Pitt Honors College

PghMomof2
Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:11:25 +0000

DS and I attended “Scholars Day” yesterday, and I thought I’d cross-post our findings, and invite other perspectives, which we KNOW exist:

Yesterday DS and I attended a special session at Pitt for kids who are on their radar for the honors college (presumably through test scores). This was our second visit and DS knows and has visited several students there anyhow, so it was an interesting case of hearing the pitch vs. having some idea of reality.

While the welcome, etc. was great (they do a good job having plenty of students out to direct traffic, etc.), the content of the day was frankly underwhelming. The speakers talked WAY too long (an hour+ each for the arts & sciences adcom, the dean of the honors college and the provost who spoke at lunch - we skipped out on that and found the food court). The dean is new to the post and while I’ve heard he’s a wonderful professor, he was dreadful at making the college sound like an attractive place to be and giving a sense of what the honors program would provide a student with. DS and I split up after lunch - I went on the dorm tour, and discovered that the “new” honors 1st year dorm (last year it was down on lower campus) is sandwiched very closely between two frat houses and the dorm that is specifically for athletes (both of those are definitely a drawback for DS, and it seems like a very odd location decision - I know not all honors students are “eggheads,” but a sizeable number of them, well, are). The dorm itself also didn’t seem to have any real common spaces…bizarre. DS went to what was supposed to be a presentation of research experiences by undergraduates and reported back that it was a room of students who had no idea why they were there or what they should be doing. The highlight of the day was that the “prize” for turning your evaluation in was a cordless mouse.

It was a very strange visit - we KNOW that it is a much better school than what was portrayed. As DS put it, if he didn’t know otherwise, it would have been taken off his list after yesterday, and even as it is, he’s thinking that he wouldn’t really want to be in the honors college (“It just doesn’t seem like it confers any extra benefits.”). I think he probably would choose to be in the honors college if he attended, just b/c of the social aspect, but agree that their program doesn’t seem to have any particular benefit.