- Apply
- Visit
- Request Info
- Give
All entering first-year Honors Scholars take LAC 100 as a cohort. This special topics seminar is taught by the director of the Honors Program and is designed to give Honors Scholars a rigorous introduction to critical and interdisciplinary thinking as well as communication and ethical reasoning skills.
This class, tied to LAC 100, introduces students to the 5 Learning Outcomes of Eastern’s Liberal Arts Core (ELAC) and life at Eastern, including navigating the Honors Program.
The first-year cohort of Honors Scholars takes LAC 200 together in the spring semester. With a focus on human inquiry, this team-taught course explores examples of aesthetic, ethical, and cultural values through the study of art, literature, and psychology. Honors Scholars learn to ask questions from various critical angles by engaging with ideas and methods from diverse disciplines.
The three required Honors Colloquia, which can be taken at any time between sophomore and senior year, promote many of the same attributes and skills (especially critical thinking and communication) as the first-year student courses, except in a format emphasizing self-directed inquiry. Utilizing small class sizes and novel and often interdisciplinary approaches to subject matter, instructors challenge students with "open-ended" assignments that encourage them to pursue their own questions and creative interpretive connections. Student evaluation consists of more than simply rewarding an exceptional work ethic, but also recognizes originality and disciplined creativity. Honors Colloquia provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their attitudes toward learning, their intellectual curiosity, and their capacity for self-education in preparation for and in conjunction with the Honors Thesis. The three Honors Colloquia satisfy Disciplinary Perspectives requirements in Eastern’s Liberal Arts Core (ELAC).
This one-credit seminar prepares students for beginning their respective thesis projects. This course is offered in the Spring semester and provides a structured forum for students to learn about thesis expectations, to ask questions, to receive advice from faculty and students further along in the program, to be introduced to research strategies and issues of concern representative of different disciplines, and to ultimately choose a thesis mentor. This course requirement may be waived for individual students at the discretion of the Program Director.
These courses comprise the capstone experience for Honors Scholars at Eastern. Ideally, the completion of this 7-credit thesis requirement (spread over three semesters) will provide an opportunity to utilize many of the skills on which their earlier Honors courses focused. The successful student will demonstrate the capacity to identify a question or project, understand its relevance within one's particular discipline, articulate a strategy for execution of the project, and complete a thesis written in the format appropriate to the discipline. Moreover this experience should provide evidence of a student's capacity to successfully complete a long-term project that reflects higher order learning and a sense of what constitutes scholarship in one's discipline.