Can you guys tell me a little more about the honors program? How do you get in? I got a likely letter OOS, but never got invited to join the honor's program. How does it work? Tell me anything about it.
S is OOS Honor Student. His invitation to the Honors Program came a week or two after he received his formal letter of admission, so it may still be coming. Approx 200 incoming first year students are offered admission to the Honors Program although I thought I heard that that number was going to increase somewhat as the got some new funding. If you are not invited First year , you can still apply in subsquent years.
S thought the biggest advantage so far was the ability to enroll in a First Year Seminar and one Honors section early. Which was particularly nice as he went to the last CTOPS. He has attended some of the other Honors programing but it has not been the biggest focus of his EC time at Carolina to date.
Admission to the Honors Program is ridiculously competitive and often seemingly arbitrary - there are around 200 slots. You should know that many of Carolina's most academically talented students are NOT in the honors program, that you can apply to get into the program once here, and that graduating with honors is a completely separate process from the honors program.
I think some other students on this board who are in the honors program would agree with me in saying that when considering Chapel Hill, the honors program seemed like a big deal to us coming in. Yet after spending time here and actually experiencing the program, I think many/most of us have come to the conclusion that the honors program is nowhere near as central to our experience here as we thought it was going to be.
I agree that the best part of the Honors Program is priority in registering for honors courses such as small 25-person sections of what would otherwise be 300-person lectures. The social programming can also be fun. But many of these benefits are available in some form to the wider student population if you are proactive in pursuing them.
I certainly recommend taking advantage of the Honors Program if you are invited; there are a lot of good things about it. But I also think it would be unwise for anyone to decline an offer of admission to Carolina simply because they were not invited to Honors. Many students who do not get into honors at Carolina are offered honors and scholarships at other institutions but turn them down to attend Carolina.
I went up to UNC for Explore Carolina earlier this week and talked to the head of the Honors program while I was there, and he said you could safely assume that if you had not received an invitation yet, you probably are not going to get one. I was/am pretty bitter about that, but I am still really considering UNC, because it really is an amazing school. Anyway, as ThoughtProvoking said, there are ways to get into the program during the spring semester of your freshman year and the fall of your sophomore year. And you can graduate with honors by writing an honors thesis and never have taken an honors course at all.
Today I received an invitation to visit UNC. Its like a postcard brochure(kinda small). The front plainly says The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Inside, there are 3 options to choose from: 1. First Look 2. Explore Carolina 3. Decision Days
Which one should I pick and who got this too?
i heard somewhere that honors is almost as hard as scholarships. well , I got honors but no scholarships. maybe it's because honors does not favor IS as scholarships do.
I certainly wish it were the other way around.
Honors is utterly meaningless and pretty random. They claim that they look almost exclusively at grades and SATs, but I had a 2390 and a 4.0 UW GPA, and I was never invited. Luckily for me, it's really more trouble than it's worth. I have a friend who recently dropped it, since it requires you to take two Honors classes a year, which is more restricting than helpful. Other than the availability of those Honors sections and a boost to your ego, there really aren't any other benefits of it, so I wouldn't worry about it. I was a little offended (which is kind of silly, I admit) when I didn't get it, but came here anyway, and it's wonderful.
