The meeting began with a few announcements. First, a subcommittee gave out Regent Scholars funding to applicants. Also, the Undergraduate Symposium was a big success, especially with the new round-table discussions.
The Iron Cross Society members once again joined us at this meeting to update their proposal for an honors college. They made several suggestions to improving the honors programs on campus, which were received positively. Some of their suggestions included having a campus visit day that was targeted specifically to honors students that would focus on high-impact learning practices here on campus. Another main issue they brought up was the lack of online information about the separate honors programs. They suggested putting an honors tab, or a high impact learning tab on the website, perhaps under admissions or academics that highlighted the programs and other beneficial things such as research opportunities, Learning Communities, and FIGS. Another suggestion for the website was that it should contain videos of current students sharing positive experiences with the honors programs and other opportunities. The Iron Cross Society, as well as the rest of the committee also felt that personal contact with admitted students would be beneficial. Phone calls to interested honors students or meetings with those students on campus would be a great tool for recruiting. Another suggestion was that although the Honors Residential Learning Community wasn’t approved, perhaps a floor of one of the existing Learning Communities could be designated “honors” to gauge interest. Another idea was to have a general honors advisor at SOAR who could help students who weren’t sure which school they wanted to be in yet find out more about the different honors programs.
The L&S Honors Program is working towards having a bigger sense of community next year with a Reception/Tailgate already planned for the beginning of the year to welcome honors students back to campus.
This was the last meeting of the year for the committee. Our next meeting will be in September. Next year we plan on continuing these discussions as well as following up on these ideas. Some of the main goals of the committee are to develop a strong sense of community and well as collaborate better between the honors programs.
-Nicole Delaney
In the fall, the University Honors Committee submitted a proposal for an Honors Residential Learning Community, but the proposal was rejected. Therefore, Cal Bergman, the associate director of Residence Life-Academics met with the committee to find ways to work with the honors program in existing Learning Communities.
Since we have discussed a lack of an honors community on campus, especially for first-year students, we felt that working with Learning Communities on campus would be a good way to help develop that experience for students in the honors program. Honors students are already well represented in Learning Communities around campus, and we would like to improve this relationship and encourage honors students to try living in a Learning Community to facilitate more interactions with faculty and like-minded students. Although Learning Communities are not just for honors students, we all feel that promoting them for honors students will be positive since such communities are proven to have beneficial effects for students both academically and socially.
A few simple ways to encourage incoming honors students to live in a Learning Community were discussed and will be implemented. In scholarship letters sent to students, there is often a sentence or two discussing academic opportunities on campus, such as these Learning Communities. The L&S Honors Program will now add a similar sentence to their acceptance letters encouraging students to consider living in a Learning Community, and directing them to the Housing Portal where they can list that preference. In addition, Learning Community pamphlets will be available at the weekly presentations about the L&S Honors Program that is given to prospective students. The CALS Honors program will hopeful be able to encourage its students to consider learning communities as well.
Our March meeting was cancelled since it will fall over spring break, so our next meeting will be in April.
-Nicole Delaney
The meeting began with a few announcements. The Teaching & Learning Symposium is on May 25-26 this year with the theme of Learning, Doing, Being. More information can be found at the following website: https://www.learning.wisc.edu/tlsymposium/. Regent Scholar proposals and progress summaries are due Feb. 25. The Honors Residential Learning Community proposal is still under review.
The focus of this meeting was on admissions and how admissions and the honors programs can work together. The Director of Admissions, Adele Brumfield attended the meeting and gave a report on admissions so far this year. She reported that admissions numbers have grown significantly this year with the final deadline still to come. She also reported that the Office of Admissions has moved to its new location.
There were several suggestions on how honors and admissions can improve how they work together. One idea was reducing the number of applications that a high achieving student must fill out for this university including admissions, several honors programs, and scholarships. Several remedies were discussed including making the honors applications available as a link from the admissions application, or possibly streamlining applications so that students only fill out a single one. There are some difficulties though, as our university is required to use the UW System Application which has rather bland essays that many high achieving students blow off. This makes it difficult for honors programs and scholarships to judge students on the basis of admissions applications because their criteria is not just high ACT/SAT scores and a good GPA. The student’s motivation is also important.
Another suggestion for improving the amount of high achieving students who come here would be tailoring campus visits to attract them. Current visits are the same for everyone, however Director Brumfield is looking into having a different option so that admitted students can look closely at campus and what is offered here, including having a session about honors programs and research opportunities on campus.
We will continue to discuss these issues and possible solutions in future meetings as it is important that the university attracts motivated and diverse students from Wisconsin, other states, and other countries.
-Nicole Delaney
The first thing we discussed in the meeting was the Undergraduate Symposium, which will be held on April 12 in the Memorial Union. It has been steadily growing over the years and will hopefully continue to showcase increasing numbers of undergraduate projects.
Next, the Honors Residential Learning Community proposal was discussed as a follow-up to the previous meeting. We felt that the proposal was quite compelling and hope that it passes the initial phase of consideration in which case a more detailed proposal would be created in the spring.
For the majority of the meeting, several members of the Iron Cross Society, an honors society on campus, gave a presentation proposing a centralized Honors College for the university. They cited the main benefits as clarifying and synthesizing information about the different honors programs offered in different schools across campus in order to give students more information, creating a single honors application for all programs, establishing specific benefits for honors students such as a residential learning community and priority enrollment, and facilitating better discussion horizontally among honors programs. They believe that an Honors College would help increase recruitment of top students as well as increase the yield of such students once they have chosen the university. It would also clarify confusing or absent information about the different programs as well as provide a better honors advising system.
After the presentation, the committee discussed the proposal. All felt that the proposal was well thought out and very bold, however several problems arose. One issue is that the current honors program is very decentralized and synthesizing all programs may be costly and difficult. Another issue is that the idea of priority enrollment for honors students may create tension among students, as well as it may encourage students to join an honors program solely for such a benefit. In addition, administrative benefits that might come from creating an Honors College are limited as only the L&S Honors Program has staff dedicated solely to honors.
The Iron Cross Society brought up many important issues that honors programs across campus are facing. It was suggested that they look closely at the problems they have identified and work on editing their proposal to address those problems, and then return to the committee to present their revised proposal. Some of the problems that were addressed may be solved through other, possibly simpler solutions, such as updating websites with better information or through the creation of the residential learning community that has been proposed.
At our next meeting in January we will be discussing how to recruit high-achieving students, especially those from diverse backgrounds and from within the state of Wisconsin with help from the admissions office. The Iron Cross Society members were invited to come to the meeting since their proposal addressed these issues.
-Nicole Delaney
The main issue we discussed at this meeting was what constitutes an honors experience. The main answers that we came up with included not just doing more work, but rather doing more in-depth projects. Honors should also allow students to be more in touch with faculty members and it should be an individualized experience. We also discussed the need to have a community of honors students within honors classes. It was suggested that a good way to foster that community as well as professor-student contact would be for professors to meet with all honors students in their honors-optional classes a few times each semester in addition to any regular office hours.
We also discussed differences in honors research as opposed to regular research. We felt that honors research should allow students some flexibility in choosing their topics as well as heavy involvement with an intellectual aspect of the project. We discussed how doing a service learning project that involved research would be beneficial to students and the community.
Finally, we discussed the possibility of having an Honors Residential Learning Community where any honors student within any college in the university could live in the future. We felt it would be a good way to foster an honors community , especially for first-years, as well as allow motivated students in different disciplines to meet. Some concerns over such a community include that it may become elitist as well as the difficulties involved in selecting students for the dorm.
At the next meeting in December we plan on discussing how honors programs can work with the admissions office.
-Nicole Delaney
