Pitt Honors College

AwesomeOpossum
Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:11:25 +0000

Current Honors Student Here:

I lived in Honors Housing all three years I was on campus. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Freshman year I stayed in Forbes Hall (the lower campus dorm). It was great: the dorm was smaller than towers (about 250 people), incredibly diverse (as compared to Pitt’s campus), and everyone was really nice and interesting. We had people from a range of majors: Engineers, pre-med, history, art, music, women’s studies, etc. Which was awesome. Also, the nice thing was the sense of community we got. Our RAs weren’t these mean, rule abiding older students. They were also our friends and classmates. I never locked my door once all year (for all three years) because I trusted absolutely everyone in the building. I used to leave my textbooks out in the hallways, people left gaming systems in the common rooms…nothing was stolen or missing at the end of the year. I also had a lot of fun: we would hold surprise birthday parties, dances, movie nights, we went downtown to watch fireworks or see a play or ballet or the symphony. Just because it was all Honors Students didn’t mean all we did was study and work. We relaxed too!

Upperclassmen housing was great. It’s a little apartment building down at Forbes and Craig (a perfect location) that only has 103 students (a mix of sophomores and juniors). You get a living room, 1-2 private bathrooms, and your own kitchen. Plus a wicked common area complete with hot chocolate maker, flat screen tvs, and an old piano anyone can play. There were monthly building dinners, other activities like speeches, talks, presentations, movies, game nights, etc. held in the building.

In terms of classes, honors were among my favorites. The professors were hand-picked by the dean to teach the class, and the classes were wayyyyy more in-depth and academically challenging than the regular version would have been for me. Also, due to this vigor, the classes were much smaller, so I got to know all my classmates as well as the professor for classes like Honors Physics and Chem, instead of being in a lecture hall of 300-400 students, it was 80-100. Much easier and close-knit.

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