University Honors - How competitive?

ophidious
Tue, 12 Aug 2014 06:06:09 +0000

I was in the University Honors for 2012. I think your son has a good chance, especially if he’s going into engineering. The support for them is much greater than for other majors (there was just one another honors student with my major and no upperclassmen to guide us).

As for the program, I’m not sure what’s changed since then, but the program in general seems to be very new and tentative. During my year student complaints got so bad that they allowed us to completely restructure meetings and honors assignments.

For certain types of students, the honors LLC may not work very well either. The social life of the dorms are very active and they do a lot, but they tend to favor the louder, more gregarious types. It was very hard for the quieter smart kids to find one another.

Honors living does come with perks. At least in Lechner, the dorm I was in, the rooms were the largest shared rooms on campus and are located in the quieter Northside right across from the dining hall and down the street from the engineering buildings. When I was in them, we had access to both dorms and one had a kitchen. Freshmen were assigned in small groups to Sophomore Advisors that are meant to be a mentor through the first year. The SAs make the honors LLC–if everything else in the program sucks, then the SAs at least can help you out. Honors priority registration is also a huge bonus. As said before, honors classes are smaller and tend to contain the same people that you’ve been grouped up with since high school. University and individual college honors students are mixed into the same classes. I couldn’t tell whether or not people who were only in college honors were also in the dorms.

Process has probably changed since my year. All I had to do was fill out a couple of supplemental essays in addition to the Apply Texas app. A whole bunch of us were “rejected” in the spring and then notified later on that they were waiting for us to accept their offer (I was not happy about this).

If he’s very ambitious and has a good idea of what he wants to do with his degree, go for it. The program is specially geared to incubate research projects as well.