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All entering first-year student Honors Scholars take FYI 100 as a cohort. This course is taught by the director of the honors program and is designed to give honors scholars an introduction to the honors program, while also introducing them to academics, campus life, and the liberal arts philosophy at Eastern.
The first-year student cohort of Honors Scholars take HON 150 in their spring semester. This team-taught course explores examples of aesthetic, ethical, and cultural values through the study of art, literature, and economics. Honors Scholars participate in an intellectual discourse of a scholarly community, while working through various texts that examine the ways in which various disciplines and works depict society and the individual's place within it.
The required Honors Colloquia should promote many of the same attributes and skills as the first-year student courses, except in a more interactive format emphasizing self-directed inquiry. Utilizing small class sizes and novel approaches to subject matter, instructors should challenge students with more "open-ended" assignments that encourage them to move beyond the goal of "instructor satisfaction" and define their personal standards of performance. At the same time, student evaluation should consist of more than simply rewarding an exceptional work ethic, but should also recognize originality and disciplined creativity. And perhaps most importantly, Honors Colloquia should provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their attitudes toward learning, their intellectual curiosity, and their capacity for self-education. The three Honors Colloquia satisfyany three of the five required LAC Tier II required courses.
This one-credit, required seminar is intended to prepare students for beginning their respective thesis projects. This course is offered in the Fall semester and provides a structured forum for students to ask questions, discuss ideas, and to be introduced to research strategies and issues of concern representative of different disciplines. This course requirement may be waived for individual students at the discretion of the Program Director.
These courses comprise the capstone experience for honors students at Eastern. Ideally, the completion of this 7-credit thesis requirement will provide an opportunity to utilize many of the skills on which their earlier honors courses focused. The successful student will demonstrate his/her capacity to identify a question or project, understand its relevance within one's particular discipline, articulate a strategy for execution of the project, and complete a thesis written in the format appropriate to the discipline. Moreover this experience should provide evidence of a student's capacity to successfully complete a long-term project that reflects higher order learning and a sense of what constitutes scholarship in one's discipline. Completion of an acceptable Honors Thesis satisfies the LAC's Tier III requirement.