13 Working with Our Many Campus Partners
Interdisciplinary Honors Program
The Interdisciplinary Honors program offers a general education curriculum that emphasizes interdisciplinary exploration across the university’s GE Areas of Inquiry, through courses that are small, seminar-style, and highly interactive. Our students are highly motivated, deeply curious, and self-consciously pursuing an undergraduate education that explores connections between and across branches of knowledge, often with the aim to better understand big and complex questions or problems (for example, how addressing unequal access to healthcare might entail putting biological sciences in conversation with social sciences and the arts in order to tailor solutions to the needs and values of diverse patient populations). Honors Program courses are not meant to be more difficult than other courses (this is not a “best and brightest” or “gifted” program), but instructors can expect students who are very eager and enjoy being challenged in the interest of deep learning.
There’s a lot of room for creativity and flexibility on the part of instructors in terms of what incorporating these values means for individual courses, but what we ask instructors to consider as a starting point are classroom activities and assignments that:
- support our emphasis on experiential learning through group work and projects.
- support Honors students’ highly intentional approach to shaping their UW educational experience with opportunities for reflection, ideally with contributing artifacts to their Honors Portfolio in mind.
If you have any questions not answered here, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at uwhonors@uw.edu, and welcome to the Honors community!