Honors: Quotations

General Information and Benefits

There are two paths for earning an honors degree at Western Oregon University: the four-year Honors Program and the two-year Honors Associate Program. In general, the four-year program is designed for students entering WOU as freshmen; the two-year program is designed for transfer students or for WOU students who apply late to Honors, often after their freshmen or sophomore years.

Academic Overview

In a challenging and motivating environment the Honors Program provides a quality foundation for the student’s specialized studies in their academic majors and minors. Through an interdisciplinary curriculum and sustained contact between students and teachers, the program forges a learning community committed to scholarly inquiry and the life of the mind.

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The program builds a supportive and demanding intellectual community to nurture individuals who will enter the wider community as producers, not merely consumers, of human knowledge.

Through specially offered seminars as well as the independent work of the Honors Thesis, students not only experience the joy of discovery but also learn the self-discipline of completing a vigorous and original major project.

For students interested in any area of study, the Honors Program offers a cohesive, challenging alternative to WOU’s Liberal Arts Core Curriculum (LACC), required of all students. The Honors curriculum, an alternate LACC, prepares students for their academic major and minor and culminates in an independent Honors Thesis during senior year. Best of all, it costs nothing to participate in Honors. The program requires only an intellectual curiosity and a willingness to challenge oneself.

Curricular Overview

The following chart reveals that all Honors courses will fit somewhere in a student’s graduation plan.

Credit Requirements, Honors vs. Non-Honors
Honors Program LACC	Western Oregon University Graduation Requirements	Non-Honors LACC
52-53	Liberal Arts Core Curriculum (LACC)	52-53
24	Math/Computer Science or Foreign Language	24
72-78	Academic Major	72-78
15-27	Academic Major	15-27
7-8	Honors Seminars & Thesis	n/a
10+	Elective Credits	10+
180+	TOTAL	180+

Enrollment in the Honors Program automatically satisfies WOU's writing-intensive (6 credits) and WR 135 (4 credits) requirements, mandatory for all non-honors students.

The public presentations of the thesis proposal and the completed honors thesis also automatically satisfy WOU's SP 111 (3 credits) requirement, mandatory for non-honors students. This frees honors students from 13 credits of non-Honors coursework that would otherwise be required.

If an honors student chooses an academic major, such as history and anthropology, that requires a thesis in their major, then that thesis automatically counts as their honors thesis.

For more detailed information about the Honors curriculum:

Additional Benefits

Some of the most distinctive benefits of participating in the Honors Program are the close friendships and class-related field trips.

Every course in the Honors Program is also designed in seminar format so that students are encouraged to play an active role. These courses rarely number more than 25 students — a welcome contrast to the much larger (45+) courses that non-Honors students usually take. Registration is also stress-free: Honors students are guaranteed a place in any Honors course.

Because class-sizes are kept small, students in the program get to know one another easily. Honors students typically enroll in common courses during their freshmen and sophomore years, making it convenient to get to know their classmates. Honors students must also take classes outside of the Honors Program during these years, so students are never isolated from the WOU community.

Some classes feature exciting field-trips as well -- which are paid for by the Honors Program because the classes are required in our curriculum:

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During fall term of their freshman year, students see an opera in Portland or Seattle as part of their music class
During spring term of their freshman year, students travel to Ashland to see three plays over two consecutive days as part of their theater class. They also take a backstage tour of the facilities.
Past science-related field trips have included visits to the Oregon Coast. In the future a trip to Mt. St. Helens or Mt. Hood is also being negotiated.

By working on (and finishing) their thesis, every honors student will have earned the unique feeling of accomplishment that stems from completing a major research project. For many students, the thesis is the highlight of their years in Honors. All honors theses are catalogued and housed for eternity in Western Oregon University's Hamersly Library.

At graduation, all Honors graduates will wear white Honors cords and be asked to stand for recognition as an Honors Program student. Graduating seniors will also have their names and full titles of their theses listed in the commencement program. Honors students' official transcripts make clear that they are Honors Program graduates and, if the graduate has earned at least a 3.25 WOU-cumulative GPA, the Latin phrase "in cursu honorum" (in a course of honors) will be printed on the student's diploma.