@ebright1028 Congrats on being invited to apply for the Honors program! Although I myself am not a member of this program, I do know a bit about it.
The Honors program is technically considered a minor, so you take a certain number of courses in order to complete the program. Your freshman seminar will be one of those courses. From what I’ve heard from friends in the program, the Honors courses aren’t too terribly hard, so you should be fine.
The single best part about the Honors program in my (non-member) opinion is the registration benefit. Honors kids get to register before everyone else does, which is super nice, especially freshman year. If you are an Honors student, you get to register at 7:30 am the day the Seniors register I believe, so you’re pretty much guaranteed to get into the classes you want.
I’d say the social life freshman year is whatever you make it! You’ll find a nice little group of friends relatively quickly (I highly recommend using IC Peers if you’ve already applied to the school - a lot of people I met on there are my real-life friends now!). What you do depends on what you enjoy. My friends and I love going down to the Commons for the day when its nice. We go to the gorges sometimes, or hang out on campus.
When its nice, you’ll see the quad covered in people hanging out, playing frisbee, and just having a good time together. When there’s snow, you’ll se huge groups on people having snowball fights. Just walk up to one of the groups and join them! Most people on campus are super friendly. There’s parties if you want them, but I don’t really think they’re at all necessary to have a good time (I haven’t gone to one, and I love my school and have so much fun there.) On some weekends, the school hosts something called IC Afterdark, which is another fun thing for the weekends. They have different themes and activities - we had a mechanical bull earlier this year! Other than that, there’s always a concert or play or something going on on campus, so you and your friends will have plenty of places to go.
Let me know if you have any other questions or need clarification on anything I said! I hope to see you on campus next year!