What's It Like to Be an Honors Student? Exploring the UT Tyler Honors College Experience

Graduating "with Honors" is often considered a quantitative academic achievement, signifying a high GPA.  But learning, growth, and intellectual engagement are not something that can be measured by numbers alone.  

What if "Honors" didn't mean "good grades?"  What if "Honors" meant curiosity, community, and complex ideas built into college life?

This week, Dr. Ross and student producer Ashley Worley discuss how the University of Texas at Tyler's Honors College has grown from a program of 20 students into a campus-wide community resource.  Dr. Paul Streufert, Dean of the UT Tyler Honors College, and recent Honors College alumni Cohen Taylor join the discussion.  Together, they unpack what the Honors experience has to offer for students of all majors, including an insider's look at its rigorous application process, coursework, and student projects.  From research presentations at state conferences to walking the streets of Italy with classmates, Honors truly offers something for everyone - including non-Honors students.

Have more questions about life in the Honors College at UT Tyler? Email us at ADRquestions@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you!

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introductions

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Stay tuned to the Ask Dr. Ross Podcast. It's created to give you info to succeed at college. Our hosts are highly qualified. Dr. Katherine Ross is a member of the University of Texas System's Academy of Distinguished Teachers. She's also a popular professor of 19th century English literature. Ask Dr. Ross is a community service of the University of Texas at Tyler.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

Well, we're here today with Dr. Paul Stroyfert, who is the founder of the UT Tyler Honors Program, along with Cohen Taylor, who is a graduate of UT and was a member of the Honors College. And of course, our producer, Ashley, is also a member of the Honors College, so we'll probably get to hear from her a little bit

What The Honors College Really Is

SPEAKER_02 0:48

too. So I'd like to begin by asking you, Dr. Stroyfert, to tell us what the Honors College is.

SPEAKER_04 0:54

Sure. Honors is just a place where people who want to get more out of their education can do more. I feel like we often fight a perception in honors, which is that it's just about being smart and it's just about like high performing students and that we check GPAs every day and that we all, you know, that it's very cutthroat or that it's very competitive. Honors is really more like a gifted and talented program for people who are a little more quirky, who want to get just a deeper and richer and more nuanced experience out of their college experience. In our national group, National Collegiate Honors Council, we talk about honors education being broader, deeper, and more complex. And I think that is such a cool way to look at the world. Like, why would you just do the basics to get through college? Why not dig deep, do projects, meet people, take classes that challenge you? That's really our vibe, is that we're here to just dig deeper into the life of the mind.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

That really pleases me to hear that. It also makes me sort of sad in a way because what it really does tell us is that one of the trends a lot of us who teach at universities have noticed is that a lot of students are here to get in, get out, and get fast. You know, and I think you, Paul, are the one who taught me the phrase fast, cheap, or good, pick two. Right. And I've always worried that when these folks try to go fast and cheap through college, they're not getting as good an education. And I was actually an honors student myself, and it was a powerful experience.

How UT Tyler Honors Began

SPEAKER_02 2:19

But you are the one who began this program, Dr. Stroyford, and I'd love you to tell briefly the story of the genesis of the program, the honors program, how did it start, and why did the folks in charge think we needed one?

SPEAKER_04 2:33

Right. Like I said, honors really is sort of an enriching thing for students, and I couldn't agree with you more, Dr. Ross, that this should be what we all do in college. It makes me a little sad that we have to have a carved-out place for it now. This should be how all of our experiences are in college. But I feel like we're kind of keeping the light on for that and that we're holding the line on that and making sure students have this deep and rich and complex experience. So honors began in 2009, and it really began very quickly. There had been a plan in place to do honors starting as early as 2000 here at UT Tyler, but the university went different directions and supported some different initiatives. So that circled back around in early 2009, and we had a provost at the time named Peter Foss who loved the idea of honors and he was a doer. He wanted it to happen. And he said very quickly, like, we need this to happen. We need to find a person to run it. I felt like I was in the right place at the right time. I had been working on the Latin program for many years here at UT Tyler and had some success there. And so I think that was what sort of led me over to honors. And the goal was very basic that first year. They said, We hope you can get 10. And I remember thinking, I can get 10. This shouldn't be bad. And we ended up maxing out our scholarship availability even and having 20. And we had some students we turned away that first year. So we grew very quickly right off the bat. So the very first year, and again, this is one of the things I'm much more comfortable saying now than I would have said, you know, 15 or 20 years ago, is that we didn't know what we were doing. We had a lot of input and a lot of different people saying how we should scholarship students. Now in honors, we have a fairly standard scholarship of $2,000 a year per honor student. And so it was money that would help support a student because they're doing this endeavor, which takes more time and slows them down a little bit. And again, I think that's such a really important way to look at the work we do in college is that we should take our time and we should read challenging books and we should spend time talking about ideas together, because that's what makes us smarter, better, and better communicators.

Scholarships And Graduating On Time

SPEAKER_02 4:35

Now you just said slows down, but they do graduate on time.

SPEAKER_04 4:38

Aaron Powell Absolutely. One of the things we've worked very hard to do is to say we can fit the honors experience in a three or four year college experience. So this shouldn't slow you down much. At worst, in honors, you would take two additional classes in the freshman year. But those classes can be counted as electives, and every major on some level needs electives. So that's how we account for them. Every year we do a lot of work to make sure that students' AP and dual credit can work with honors as well. That can be very tricky. Every student's unique in that respect, but we want to get you graduated. We just don't want you to be in such a hurry that you don't take time to engage intellectually with the world.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

So you said you had close to twenty the first year, but how many do you have now?

SPEAKER_04 5:27

This fall, we anti fall of twenty-six, we anticipate over three hundred students. So it has grown tremendously. We have a staff now of five. At the time it was I got a halftime release. I got to not teach one class basically or two classes so that I could try to get honors up and running. It's a much bigger ecosystem now, a much bigger college now. And for those 300 students, too, we never want to lose the scaling. We don't want it to seem like you're just a number in honors. We know people know you. Your colleagues, the staff, and the faculty know people. And that's so important is to be able to connect with people. And that's always been a hallmark of honors.

A Student’s Honors Experience

SPEAKER_02 6:04

Aaron Powell Okay. Well, I think it's time to hear from you, Cohen. So how have you experienced all this slowing down and having intellectual experiences that Dr. Stroifer's talking about?

SPEAKER_03 6:14

Aaron Powell Well, Honors has been absolutely wonderful for me. I am a recent graduate. I graduated in May of 2026, and I started honors right after I graduated high school in the fall of 2023. So I actually was a three-year undergrad career, and I did a lot of dual credit in high school, like Dr. Stroyford was talking about. I had about 60 credits walking in through the door because I graduated high school with my associates. It sped up my undergrad career, but also I only got to do three years of honors instead of four. So that's maybe one thing that looking back I would like to do, but I'm still I'm an alumni now and I'm still doing honors things, so I don't think it's affected me too much.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

Well, so why'd you pick UT Tyler? Did the honors invitation seal the deal for you, or was there something else about this program?

SPEAKER_03 6:58

Honors was a really big part of picking where I wanted to go to college. My junior year, when a lot of juniors in high school are looking at like, oh, what college do I want to go to, what program, what major. When I came out to UT Tyler for a Patriot premiere or a top 25 celebration in the fall of my junior semester, I remembered meeting a bunch of people, Dr. Stroyford included, talking about the honors college, talking about kind of some of the STEM programs, so like pre-med, pre-health, and everything. And that was a big part of why I wanted to come here because of who I talked to at the honors table.

SPEAKER_02 7:26

So people. What is the process? I mean, did you apply just to UT Tyler or is there a special application to honors?

The Application And Essay Philosophy

SPEAKER_04 7:36

That's a great question, right? So we do have a separate application. In recent years, it has been due December 1st because it's tied now to admissions and to the general scholarship application for the university. So students, you know, who are planning on coming here and can apply for honors before December 1, it's a two-part application. And the first part is pretty basic. You know, where did you go to high school? What is your intended major? We just want to get to sort of know you that way. But in even in that part of the application, we ask unusual questions. One of my favorites is if there was a visiting alien that came to Earth for six hours, what would you do with them to show them the human experience? And I love that question. That question was developed by a staff member a couple of years ago, and we learned so much about students from that, the answers to that question. Another favorite question is tell us about your most unusual friend. Because honors really values community, and we need to know that you're not just here for yourself, but that you're here for other people and that you connect with others and that you're looking to make connections. And we all do better, I think, at least in honors, we do better when we are connected, not competitive. One of the things we strive for in honors classes is not to build in, you know, are you the smartest one in the room? I don't care if you're the smartest one in the room. In fact, that often gets in your way when you're trying to learn and think through ideas. So we build it as a collaborative thing in those freshman classes. We're looking for people who are smart, motivated, hard workers, but curious. Give me curious any day over competitive. The second part of the application is an essay that has a prompt where we ask students to respond to an idea and it's intentionally open-ended, and we're looking to see if a student can play with an idea. And that again is take some risks, use some examples, don't use AI to write it. The essay prompt, and it has been this one for years, and I believe will be the prompt for this coming year, is the philosopher Aristotle is attributed to have said that the mark of an educated mind is the ability to entertain an idea without necessarily believing it. Do you think that this is true? Why or why not? And so we ask students to sort of explain what do they think Aristotle meant. One of the sort of behind-the-scenes peaks at this essay is we're intentionally trying to trot out a big, impressive, almost scary name and say, okay, Aristotle. I don't really care if you know who Aristotle is or not. That doesn't really matter to me. But are you able to work through what he thinks is the mark of education and the ability to think through ideas without believing or disbelieving them? And to say, like, does exploration mean something to you? And that's really what we're, again, what we're after. And good essays are ones that use examples. They're the ones that take the question seriously and try to play with the idea. And we see lots of different kinds of answers to this. So it's a little subjective. But the idea is, are you trying? Are you really playing with the idea? Do you think there might be some wisdom in learning from the past? These are the things we look for. And these are students who tend to do really well in honors.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

Aaron Powell I noticed Ashley was nodding when you were talking about that. I think you remember having to write that if I do.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

And it took a long time to sit down and unpack that. It takes longer, actually, than I think just doing a research paper or doing a report on something. And the engagement you get from that is actually like I remember that essay. I don't remember a lot of other essays that I've written. But I remember that essay, and I think I learned more from the process of having to work backwards through that question, not just what is it they want from me? What does the person reading this want to hear me say?

SPEAKER_04 11:20

Aaron Powell Yeah. The nice part of that is that there's no real answer, right? Like we don't I don't know what you're gonna say. It's actually very hard to get coached on it because it is so open-ended. We just kind of want to see what you think.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

Aaron Powell Well, Cohen, I'm dying to ask you how you answered the alien question. Do you remember?

SPEAKER_03 11:36

Aaron Ross Powell I don't believe the alien question was around when I applied. Oh, maybe we instituted it the year after you. My application cycle was the Aristotle question, and then I got an interview after.

SPEAKER_02 11:47

How was that interview experience?

SPEAKER_03 11:48

Aaron Ross Powell The interview experience for honors is honestly amazing. I have kind of a two-parter for this. So as an applicant, when I was a senior in high school, I remember all the interviews are conducted over Zoom because everybody's applying from all parts of Texas and even out of state. And it was me, about five other applicants, Dr. Stroyford, and then maybe one other staffer or a student. And I remember the interview process, it was a bunch of different questions, and we rotated the order. And I remember being very nervous. But now as a recent alum and as an honors student, I've actually been on the other side of the interview interviewing prospective students. And I've probably interviewed maybe like 40, 50, 60 prospective students in my time in honors, because I started it my sophomore year, my junior year. So I've gotten to be on the other side of that, asking them questions and then helping them on the other side. And the Zoom interviews are honestly kind of one of my favorite parts about the application because you get to really like see who a student is. Because in an essay, you know their name, but you don't know their face, you don't know how they talk or how they conduct themselves and how they hold themselves. So the the Zoom interviews, while it is online and it is maybe impersonal at times, it also gives you a very good glimpse into who I believe a person could be or who a person is and how they would fit into honors.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

Which actually brings me to something else, because Paul, of course, was an English professor and a classics professor. Ashley, as our viewers know, is a communications person. You are talking about pre-med, but I heard something about

Building Community With The LLC

SPEAKER_02 13:13

business. Would you tell us how does this honors college get you in? Because I was thinking it was all going to be humanities.

SPEAKER_03 13:20

So my actual major in undergrad was general business. I swapped from marketing to general business. I am pre-med, and when I got to college, I started doing all of my honors courses. So that was World Techs One, and then a bunch of my business prereqs and everything. And as well as on top of everything, I did all of the prerequisites for medical schools, and I'm finishing up my masters, and then I hope on applying for medical school in May of next year.

SPEAKER_02 13:46

So it took you three years to do all that. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_04 13:49

I don't think Cohen ever sleeps.

SPEAKER_03 13:51

I'm just saying he's one of those students who are college has been you get out of it what you put into it.

SPEAKER_02 13:55

Boy, is that the truth. Thank you for saying that.

SPEAKER_03 13:57

That is the lifeblood of my college experience, is just I'm gonna get out what I put in. So I put in a lot of effort into whether it be honors or the student government logos honors has, or I was an RA on campus, so I worked for the university for a couple of years. I was actually the honors LOC RA.

SPEAKER_02 14:13

What does that mean?

SPEAKER_03 14:14

So the Honors LOC is a learning-living community at Ornellis Hall. So it's a hallway basically full with like 2530 honors students, and I was the honors RA. And I got to live with on the same hallway a bunch of freshman honors students and be their resident assistant, which is if you live on campus, you have a resident assistant. But I also got to be a part of their honors experience and kind of guide them, like, hey, this is what honors is. And if they have any questions for this whole past academic year, I was there to help them and support them and try to put them on the path to success.

SPEAKER_04 14:44

We typically take like 60 to 65 freshmen every year, and a handful of them choose to live in the LLC. My feeling on that is that if you are living with people that are also in some of your same classes, you are more likely to build deeper bonds and a more close-knit community together, which is what we hope happens in the LLC. The other strength, though, I think, of UT Tyler is that we don't require students to live in the LLC. Some schools require you to live with honor students and to only be with honor students. And I don't think that's the right way to go. Everyone's different, and some people want to live at home. And some people have a roommate from high school that they want to live in Patriot Village with. Go in peace. That's great. Honors tries to give you room to be the person and the scholar that you want to be. We have some policies and rules, and we have some things that are absolute, but but very few ultimately. You can kind of craft your own experience the way you will. One of the things I loved about Cohen being the RA for that living learning community is I knew that he would be really good at encouraging people to be connected, encouraging people to think and to have conversations. I think it's been a really great thing for us to have that option. But again, that may not fit you. And so I tell students all the time, you know, one of our number one questions is do I have to live on campus? You do not. You do you. And this is available if you want it.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Aaron Ross Powell I would say there's plenty of avenues for community engagement outside of just the LLC with the broader campus, but also with the honors community, because these classes that you have structured in, when you come in as a freshman honors student, you take classes with your cohort.

World Text And Image Explained

SPEAKER_04 16:18

Right. So saying every incoming honors student has to take world text one and two, their first year. It's a year-long course with two professors. It's team-taught, interdisciplinary, hopefully. And my favorite response from honor students is at the end of the year when they come to me and say, I wasn't sure if I was going to like this class, but this was my favorite class. And this is a nursing major or a business major or somebody who maybe, you know, looks at the world a little differently. And we said, This is the one class you have to take. It's where we build the team, it's where we build, you know, intellectual rigor, we work on your writing. And yes, you have to take these. The word I like to use, it's a bit of a dad joke, is to say that this is fundatory, right? I got some smiles around the table, right? Is that you have to take honors 1351, but I hope that you come to a place where you say, I get to take honors 1351. I get to be with two professors and talk about ideas for a year. You'll never have that experience anywhere else.

SPEAKER_02 17:13

Aaron Powell Now you do have to explain a little bit about what's in world text and image so we can understand how this business pre-med person and that nursing person in Ashley, what is it about this course that includes everybody, entices everybody, even folks who probably start out thinking I hate English.

SPEAKER_04 17:33

And that's one of those one of those lines in the sand that I like to draw with students is to say, if I ever hear a student say, I'm going to my honors English class, I'm like, wait, this is not an English class. I do not have a degree in English. But the idea is I want people to not think about the disciplinary borders and boundaries that we've put up. If someone says, I'm no good at English, well, you're not going to be good at honors English. But what about World Text and Image, which it deals with literature and stories from around the world? It deals with a variety of ways that those texts come to us. And then we also talk a little bit. I mean, I don't have a degree in art history, but we talk about images and the way that stories and communication happens. Another way to put it would be it's sort of a humanities class, but it does have elements of history, it has elements of philosophy. And we charge all the professors who teach world text and image one and two. They get to pick the books they study. Each of the sections is are pretty different. They depend on the expertise of the faculty. But the idea is we're going to have a conversation about books. Read this thing and then come ready to class to tell me what you think. It's a little different approach. It's more about what do you think the meaning of this is? Why is does this work this way?

SPEAKER_02 18:44

Now who gets to teach this class?

SPEAKER_04 18:46

One of the challenges we have in honors is that we do not have our own faculty. So we have to borrow faculty from different departments. And that can be very tricky because you have to find people who have disciplinary expertise. So people who are in the realm of the humanities, so that includes, you know, people from literature and languages, people from the history department, people from political science, people from the Department of Communications, with a partner. And team teaching isn't as easy as it looks. You have to get the right mix of people, you have to have the right approach. And I think one of the things we all ask faculty to do is to in some ways loosen up a little bit on the disciplinary things that we all learned and value and love, but to trade that in place for what are the good conversations and the deep uh thinking that we can do about these books and then the writing that we do about these books.

SPEAKER_02 19:33

But I w did want to hear that I think there's more than just these two courses that you all have that special to the program, and one of them is the projects you're doing.

SPEAKER_04 19:41

That's

Research And Service Projects

SPEAKER_04 19:42

right. So the second half of Honors is built on a much more individualized basis. So students can choose to do either a research project or a service project in their junior and senior year. And the joke I always make is that the good news is you get to drive. And the bad news is you get to drive. Right? So in other words, you get to pick a project that you love and that matters to you. But the thing is no one will bother you to do it. It's your job to work with a faculty member to do a research project that matters to you. And it's not like showing up at a class and doing what they tell you to do and then going home. So the nice thing is students get to really explore and do cool stuff in their junior and senior year. And we require students who are doing the research side of things to present their work at an outside conference. So we take students every year to the national honors meeting or the regional honors meeting, and students have presented and done just incredible things at those presentations. And again, a sort of new wrinkle for honors is for students who want to do more, I guess I would call it applied research. That's the service track. If you want to find a nonprofit in town to work with and to do a cool project with, I think that's also valuable and also includes a kind of research, it's just more hands-on. So we've had students work at For the Silent, which is a local anti-trafficking group. We've had students work with East Texas Food Bank, we've had students do a we had a student who did a podcast for her service project. Any range of things, but I want every honor student to leave with a project they're proud of and something they can point to and mentors they can rely on for letters. All this is built so that you're successful in your next step, whatever that is.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

How did you move from a 20-person kind of honors program to a 300-person college? Why is it a college and why is that important?

SPEAKER_04 21:32

In honors education, the difference between a college and a program is largely up to the institution. Some people think it's about size, and that could certainly be the case. We are much bigger now than we were as a program. But really, what it means for us is that we have a place at the table with other deans, that honors is an integral part of what we're doing at UT Tyler and having conversations with other deans and learning to get to know their students and what they need and their faculty. And that to me, like someone asked me, like I Promoted to Dean in January of 2023. And someone asked, So how's it being Dean? And I'm like, it's a lot more meetings. That's really the difference, right? Because now I'm more in tune with what other people are doing on campus and getting to know what their students are like because we serve them. What we always say in honors is your major comes first. We want to get you done, and we don't want to interfere with your work in your major. But honors is that add-on that makes it broader, deeper, more complex. And that's why I think it's so great for students who want to do that, who want that kind of experience. There's nothing like it.

SPEAKER_02 22:31

You mentioned

Events That Open Honors To Campus

SPEAKER_02 22:32

a couple things, four projects you have every year. Are these things that the whole university can participate in?

SPEAKER_03 22:38

Absolutely. One of our is kind of staples is every October we have a global quiz night. That is a campus-wide, university-wide. I know people that don't even go to school here, like the like students at TJC are even invited to attend and participate. It is a global trivia night. So trivia from anything from like ancient history to modern day sports to pop culture to music to theater to the arts to anything.

SPEAKER_02 23:02

So you all create the questions?

SPEAKER_03 23:03

No, Dr. Stroyford and the staff create the questions. We all get together and write our quiz night questions each year. Some of them are absolutely insane. Like, how would anybody know this? But somebody in the back corner knows it word for word. At Global Quiz Night, we have like three, four hundred people turn out usually. And that's not all honor students. No, ma'am. No. A majority of them are. But also it's like, hey, I have a buddy of mine and he's he's really good at sports and music, and then he'll be on my team. And it is very competitive. So what are the other three? They could be different things and they are different things every year. There's Lyceum in the spring. Lyceum is like a big research presentation and poster session. So for students that have done the research track, they will go and they will present a poster. And also, even if you didn't do the research track, if you did the service and leadership track like I have, they also host like a tabling event where all the service and leadership people also have kind of like a round table and we talk about our projects and what we've done. And it was it's kind of more like a recap on our semester.

SPEAKER_04 23:59

We try to do many different kinds of things. We don't want everything to anything to get stale for it to be a checklist or a routine. So some years we'll bring in a speaker. One of my favorite honors colloquia, honors events was we had a staff member who found a Google story online about a marine biologist in California. So she called him on the phone and said, Would you come to East Texas to talk to students about whale songs? And he's like, Yep. And we had to go to Dallas to rent gigantic subwoofer speakers so we could hear the whale songs. But when this guy, his name is John, when he played the whale songs through those speakers, it shook the UC theater. And he gave the most interesting talk on animal noises that I've ever and we don't, you know, we don't have a marine biology major here. We have a marine biologist in Dr. Brown in the biology department. But you know, this is something that like maybe a business student may not, you know, you may not go to a talk about whale songs, but you got to go to a talk about whale songs. And it was cool, right? Like that's what I love about it, is it's living the life of the mind and exploring what cool things are out there. Some of them are more serious, some of them are more fun, like Quiznight, but they're always meant to be engaging.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

Aaron Powell If I could add something here, I have never been in a situation with honors where I felt like somebody wasn't welcome. We have a hall now. It's got a kitchen, there's a room with couches that's also the classroom. There are people who are not in honors, who come and hang out. There are people who were not in honors who would come and meet after hours in those rooms to have a movie night, to have a game night, to share a pizza. There are spaces that honors shares with everyone on the campus community. It's just a matter of reaching out.

SPEAKER_02 25:34

And this is something Ashley and I have talked about quite a lot over the years and one of my great concerns because we are a lot of commuters. Ashley's a commuter, but how do you give community to commuter students? And I know Ashley has said that you all, the honors program has done that for her.

SPEAKER_03 26:04

Time is the issue, absolutely. And I think honors is really good about kind of making different spaces that like is available.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

I well I guess all these programs, the issue is getting people to do it, isn't it? Right.

SPEAKER_03 26:15

Yeah, you can't really experience anything if you don't want to either have the drive or you just want to have the experience. I know a lot of people personally that just honestly aren't too interested in doing the extracurriculars outside of school, whether it be they're so passionate interested about something else already. Like I know a lot of people that are interested about research, so they're already in research labs off campus that have nothing to do with the university. So it's just whatever the student wants. So if you are wanting to get out there and meet new people and experience something, nobody's ever been turned away either from honors or from like doing a club outside of honors just because they like weren't in the program. I know plenty of people, like for example, on the honors living learning community. I had students that weren't in honors and they attended all the honors events because maybe their roommate wasn't an honors student, and they're like, I'm not in this, but my roommate's going to it. I have an invite, I feel welcomed in this space, and then they go and they have a wonderful time, and they'll probably go to the next one as well.

SPEAKER_04 27:09

Absolutely. I mean, I think I think you have to define what honors is, but it also needs to breathe. One of the most intentional things that we do for the campus is Lyceum, which we've already talked about, but that event is open to all students who do research on our campus. We get medical students who present at Lyceum, we get nursing PhDs who present at Lyceum, we get lots of different things, and that's one way honors can serve everybody. To say, look at this cool research that all of us do. We require the honors students, it's again fundatory. And that gives us our base. That means we know that the Lyceum will come off every year because we'll have at least 20 or 30 people that'll be graduating and presenting. But then now it's grown to we had over a hundred and was it 160 projects this year? I mean, this is way beyond what honors does, but we do this because we love it and because we want the campus to know look at all this incredible stuff that's happening. And that's our biggest, maybe most public-facing thing. But just anecdotally, like both Ashley and Cohen have said, the honors hallway, the honors classrooms, which are lounges and kitchens and all the other things, are often full of people who are connected or friends or this or that. I've done academic advising to students who aren't in honors because they needed help and they were walking through the hall and weren't sure where to go. That's our vibe.

Study Abroad And Joining Honors Later

SPEAKER_03 28:24

I would also like to add, as a part of that, honors did a study abroad trip last May that a lot of non-honours students that have never been in honors, had no part of honors, or maybe knew somebody in honors that went on the trip. We went to Italy last May. I was a part of this, and we had 19 students. It was an honor study abroad trip, and then the application was open to everybody campus-wide. Literally almost every part of Honors is open at some extent, or even to the complete capacity to students outside of Honors, other than I would say, like World Techs, like the honors courses are honors students. But other than that, literally every other part of Honors is accessible in some way, shape, or form to students not in honors.

SPEAKER_04 29:02

If I can add just a quick point on that, too, we have focused in this conversation about how do you approach honors as an incoming freshman. We also encourage students who find us later or we find them later to apply at the end of their freshman year or at the end of their sophomore year. The only real requirement we have for current or transfer students who are coming from different schools to join honors, the only thing we ask is that you have four semesters remaining so that you have enough time to complete that junior and senior level project. My heart breaks a little bit when I meet a senior, a rising senior who's like, Can I join honors? I'm like, you just don't have enough time to get all the things done.

SPEAKER_02 29:35

It does have to have some things that are signifying that what you did. This is a real thing. It's not just, oh, you're smart, we're gonna give you a name. Yeah, no, I think that's important. Is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you think it's real important to get out in the airwaves for people to know?

Fun, Belonging, And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_01 29:54

I know we've sort of talked about this, but just to make it perfectly clear that honors is also fun. Sometimes people don't it's like actually fun. Sometimes people, you know, they see the word honors or they hear about, you know, oh, you're taking world text and image, you're reading Kant, you know, whatever. These dense, uh, sort of traditionally unfun texts. Well, that's not all you're doing. We're also hosting a talent show where people get up and are complete goofballs, and some guy has a giant sombrero on and he's clapping the coconuts like Monty Python for the horse hoofbeats, you know? We have plenty of fun and social things that happen. And even inside the classroom, world text and image was fun and lively. Those were some of the most serious and also at different times some of the most silly and and fun conversations. So it's fun. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 30:51

I'm glad you added that. Cohen? What do you want to add?

SPEAKER_03 30:54

I would honestly just like to say that honors has been such a a part of my college experience and that anybody that is able to apply, whether you're an incoming high school senior or any part of your college journey, like Dr. Stroyford said, you should just give it a shot and apply if it is something that you think you'd like. And honors isn't for everybody. And what I mean by that is if if you don't think you'd enjoy it, then you don't have to apply for it at all. It's meant to be thought-provoking, and you're meant to find people that you will spend your college experience with, like friends, and build relationships with mentors and like maybe uh research areas, which I have done. Honors is the most welcoming part of this campus, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_04 31:33

As I sat here and thought about this stuff, and thank you for the chance to articulate what it is we do. Sometimes it's good to just back up a little bit and say, why do we do what we do? How does this work? What are the things that we need to think about? You know, for many years it was about getting bigger, and bigger's fine, but I think for me, it's always about the connections you have with people. I just will say this for myself. I found college utterly transformative. It was so powerful. The friends I made, the creativity we had. Just for example, I was a theater minor. I am not an actor. I do not write plays. I do not, you know, I didn't pursue that as a career, but I learned how to read a text. I learned how to question people, how to work together with people, how to deep read a text. There are so many cool things we can get out of that. And in many ways, for me, honors is a way of paying that forward and hoping that we can foster that great experience for students that I felt I had when I was in college. And it is fun. I am the luckiest guy on campus because each day I get to go, I really am. And I mean that and I try to stay really grounded about that because the nice thing about honors is it's opt-in, that no one's there that that doesn't want to be there. I just mean that as a way of saying, if our vibe isn't what you do, cool, go in peace. Like you can be all the things other ways. But if this speaks to you, if you are curious and you like other quirky people, this could really help catapult you to something great. And we've had students who have been successful in so many ways, from the very quietest ways of being successful to people who have gone on to grand careers and really splashy things. And all of them are successful in their own ways. And I that just means a lot to me that we could help foster that and build a bridge to that next spot.

SPEAKER_02 33:11

Well, I commend you all for that, and I really appreciate your spending so much time with us sharing your story. Ashley, you want to wrap us up?

SPEAKER_01 33:18

Sure. We just wanted to take a minute to thank our guests for coming and speaking with us. We also want to thank our listeners, and if you have any questions that you would like to direct towards Dr. Stroyfert, any questions about the Honors College, the social life of the Honors College, you'd like to ask Cohen, you can always email us at adrquestions at gmail.com or leave a comment under our YouTube video. Thanks for listening.