When Heather McLaughlin was applying to college, one thing that drew her to the University of Vermont was the Honors College. This was a leap of faith on her part, because the Honors College was new, with no track record.</p>
<p>Four years later, she’s happy with her decision. Today, she’ll be attending commencement with 89 other students in the college’s first full graduating class.</p>
<p>“The best part of the Honors College was the opportunity to take classes in areas that professors are really excited to teach,” McLaughlin said in an e-mail. “Junior year, I took a class called Psychoanalysis and Film … in which we interpreted film using psychoanalytical ideas of Freud and Lacan.”</p>
<p>Not quite typical fare for a biochemistry major, as she was. Still, she valued the interactions with other “intellectually driven students with very diverse majors and interests” in a place where “everyone is challenged to expand their ideas and connections.”</p>
<p>“Since the Honors College is a residential college, we were together not only in the classroom, but also in our late nights,” McLaughlin said. “We learned so much from each other by watching different movies, late-night debates and applying what we learn in class to our own lives.”</p>
<p>McLaughlin will attend graduate school at Harvard… A key benefit the Honors College offered for McLaughlin, she said, was "to keep my thoughts open to the wider world around me.</p>
<p>“The Honors College encouraged me to continue to examine the broader issues surrounding my research,” she said, “and not to shy away from the more philosophical, rather than technical, debates concerning science.”