Why Honors?
The case for joining the Honors Program is both simple and counter to the taken-for-granted way of thinking about the value of education in the United States in the early 21st century.
Time tells us that the value of education is that it prepares you to succeed in a good job. Make no mistake, an honors education will assist you in that pursuit. Working with our colleagues through the whole of the University, we will train you in ways that will give you the opportunity to thrive in your future professional life and become leaders in your fields. But honors education does more than that.
What is its extra value?
An honors education will prepare you not only for a living, it will prepare you to live well—to flourish as a human being. How do humans come to flourish? We flourish by developing the capacity to organize and integrate our lives around the pursuit of meaningful and achievable goals.
That requires us to first set our sights beyond what we already can do, what we already know and what we already have. The honors program will nurture your capacity to raise your eyes beyond your immediate horizons and inspire you to seek. In other words, no matter how much you think you know, we will make you ask questions and seek out answers about the world around you. No project or achievement—whether it is starting a business, becoming a Marine, sending a spacecraft to Pluto, or undertaking the commitment to make a family with a partner—is possible without the impulse to seek. And seeking is driven by a sense of wonder: what lies beyond the horizon. For well over a hundred thousand years, human beings have raised their eyes to the horizon and wondered what lay beyond.
So while the Honors Program cultivates wonder, wonder alone is not enough for a flourishing life. Wonder needs to meet some form of resistance. Challenge is the crucible in which wonder and ambition are transmuted into ability and excellence. From your first day at SIUE to your culminating senior project, this program will provide a set of challenging experiences both within and without the classroom. And, in overcoming those challenges, whether they be improving your ability to speak, to write, to make connections, to create, or to engage in a reasoned argument, your wonder will be transfigured into persistence and adaptability as you are forced to bring together discrete components of your learning and your experience.The program puts before you challenges that will require you to integrate your coursework, your service and your engagements with the campus and the community.
Make no mistake, sometimes you will fail. But, the honors program will teach you how to harness your failures and turn them into successes. Instead of teaching you to fear failure, we will help you see failure as the most important teaching tool available. By experiencing success and failure, both your ambition and humility will grow. By experiencing success and failure, you will recognize that everyone around you, including your friends, family and professors, have all failed and at times have been broken in some way. Your capacity to sympathize with others will grow, as will your recognition that in order to sustain and extend the heritage we receive from our ancestors, we must work together.
Honors at SIUE will help you realize that hope grows out of communities of humans working together, assisting each other and compensating for each of our flaws. And, when you leave the honors program to continue on to the next phase of your journey, you will be prepared to take on the opportunities and challenges of your personal, professional and public lives in expanding ways—to live as a flourishing human being.
But while we can tell you all the great things that happen with honors students and while we can talk about the added value of honors education, it is more powerful to let our students tell you why they participated in honors.
Natalie Chandler
“Honors is a chance to diversify your college experience. At SIUE, honors does not mean more busywork or extremely difficult courses, it means joining a community of different majors and different people. It’s an easy way to find your place at SIUE. Not only do we expose students to a wide range of people and experiences and subjects, but we make it so students can explore more disciplines they may find interesting.”
Jacob Beebe
“Honors provides a unique and new experience that not every student may get otherwise. But it is very special and important when the opportunities to do honors arise. The classes, professors and students provide new ways of thinking and engaging that are not pursued in many regular classes, and honors courses allow students to share and receive thoughts on topics that are very much relevant to our lives.”
Justin Walker
“The benefits of honors will be different for everyone. I think one thing that rings true for all, is that at some point, whether it be while still in the program, or maybe two years after you graduate from it, you start to see and feel the lessons which the program teaches you about life, community and humanity from day one. These lessons are not something which are reachable on one's own, and it is so special and unique to honors to be able to start these lessons in your young formative years, together as a community.”
You have a choice if honors education is right for you. When making that choice, we want you to have the right information. So read on and see what our students think are some of the biggest myths and realities when it comes to honors at SIUE.
Read the Myths vs Reality for Honors
