I have had three go through Temple Honors. There are no additional classes associated with honors, but there are honors sections for many of the required humanities courses. Like almost every other college, there’s a humanities core that all students have to take.
You ABSOLUTELY want to accept honors.
The honors sections of classes are generally better, smaller, and with better instructors. This is nice not only for the humanities electives, but also classes like Calculus and Physics that all engineers have to take, where smaller classes is WAY better. My oldest daughter is a graduated EE major who was also honors.
Dedicated honors housing for all 4 years in the 1300 dorm (which is one of the newest/nicest dorm buildings)
Honors advising which is more accessible than general advising
Early class registration (this is huge!)
Early housing registration (if you are returning student and want to stay in the dorms, this is nice)
Generally, the honors community makes Temple feel more personal. My kids spent loads of time hanging around in the Honors lounge and my daughter who is a current Temple senior CS major is an Honors Ambassador because she loves the community.
As to whether or not “Honors” on the resume has any benefit I can’t say, but the other benefits make honors worthwhile.
Feel free to message me directly with any specific questions about Temple Honors or Temple Engineering.
@stencils, Any idea about the college of liberal arts at Temple? My D24 was admitted to Honors with a decent scholarship. How easy it’s to change colleges or majors at Temple?
I was told by a Temple AO that you don’t officially declare your major until the end of sophomore year, so there seems to be flexibility. I’m not sure if that includes engineering or business majors, where you often have to be a direct admit…
Does anyone know if Temple is considering delaying the deadline to commit given the FAFSA delays? It will be hard for us to commit to the school if we don’t know how much we are going to have to come out of pocked for our son to attend and what our financial aid options are. We checked the portal and didn’t see any information about financial aid packages or total cost of attendance.
Has anyone else received any financial aid information aside from merit scholarship awards?
We are in the same boat. We were considering signing up for one of the admitted student days, as we’ve never been there. But it doesn’t make sense for us to drive 5 hours both ways if we can’t afford it. But we’ve heard mixed things about campus so it’s important to see it.
We toured last week and thought it was great! Felt safe and facilities really nice, lots of students socializing everywhere, great food. I was pleasantly surprised.
If you are on Facebook try and follow the Temple University police association and Temple University parents only safety group. Basically the campus police are understaffed and lately huge groups of adolescents 200/300 have been coming on campus (taking subway in ) and causing problems. Students are afraid to leave dorm rooms. There are other things that have happened since I started following these pages but this is the latest.
I am conflicted sharing as I really think it is a good school. Ultimately we decided against it for these reasons. I understand every big city is going to have crime but when parents are constantly saying they can’t wait until their student graduates so they can get out of there it makes you take pause.
I was a student at Temple from 1995 to 1999. To be fair, more people were shot on Penn Campus than Temple during that 4 years. But a few streets off to Kensington or further north, it was more of a wild wild west.
Temple makes a big effort to create a safe environment for its students and generally speaking, students knew how to protect themselves like travel in large groups and avoid certain side streets. At one time, we suspect Temple was buying up the city block to create a safe zone along Broad St.
However, there is nothing that will prevent a kid with a gun from walking up to a large group and demand wallets.
Ugh. My kiddo really loves the school and the program he got into-- there’s so many great things about it. There are 30,000 students, so maybe a couple parents saying that isn’t the whole experience (I hope!). I lived in NYC for many years, so it’s tough for me to gauge if it’s really dangerous or more like suburban parents reacting to unfamiliar city life. Gives me pause either way. Sigh…
One big difference between NYC and North Philly is people. Any given time in NYC there are a lot of different people walking on streets, from everywhere. At night, in North Philly, only the locals walk in the streets and they know you are not from there.
LIke you said, 30k students make Temple their home. We (kids from CA suburbs) used to call N Philly Gotham City and we all made it. I have even taken my kids back to visit a few times. In all honesty, your kid should be fine and Philly has been transformed into a fine city. Just need to keep your street-smarts on and keep eyes open.
Well you may be right. It is a large school and maybe it is just a handful of parents that are upset.
I wonder if you could have him do an overnight or something and really get him to talk to other students. Perhaps they would let him know things are not as bad as we are hearing.
Great idea, I’ll look into that! We also have family in Philly-- they were not concerned about the Temple campus and live close by-- just said you need common sense safety precautions…
I don’t know if Temple still does this, but back in the day, I was able to call up Housing and they actually let me stay in the UG housing for two nights. This was during the summer (I think it was July) and charged me only $35 a night. I just told them I was an accepted student who needed to do things on campus before school started. They were very accommodating. Probably wouldn’t hurt to call. I don’t think this is unique to Temple because I was able to do the same at U Chicago a few years later when I needed a place to sleep before an interview on campus.
