Monday, September 12, 2011

Honors Orientation

The Honors program never made sense to me. Take harder classes and write extra papers in order to get a note on your transcript and diploma that you graduated with honors. Or you could just take the regular classes, not write extra papers, pull a decent GPA, and graduate cum laude. Yes, "cum laude" means "with honors".

I joined, because I thought it would be useful to get priority registration. At the time anyone could join their freshman year, no matter how well they did in high school, just by taking the orientation course. In addition to the priority registration, I also got a discounted ticket to the Chinese terra cotta warriors exhibit, which was pretty neat.

By the time I finished my freshman year, I was technically a junior with all my AP credits and other courses I had completed. The priority registration wasn't as useful, so it wasn't much of a blow when I got kicked out of the Honors program due to my calculus-laden GPA.

Whatever they talked about in this course (study skills, how to fill out your priority registration form, where the big bowl of candy was located in the honors lounge, etc.) it wasn't enough to make me try to get back in. Oh, I could have. Making the Dean's List every semester after my freshman year was over, I had that part down, but I was starting to improve my understanding about the differences between things that are useful and things that just make you feel like you worked really hard.

With that, I leave you with an essay question from the application to the current Honors program:
You return to your room in the residence hall next fall, and on the floor just outside the door you find a hard hat, a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, and one additional object. In addition to revealing the identity of the third object, explain how the hard hat, the book, and the third object got there and their significance.
Leave your response in the comments, and you could be awarded Blog Reader with Honors.

2 comments:

B Flat Major said...

A construction worker with a penchant for English literature just enrolled in the Honors program. The third item, the entire bowl of Elitist Candy swiped from the Honors lounge, was his not-so-subtle way of sticking it to The Man for looking down on his blue-collar past. :-)

sostinkinhappy said...

Where's a like button for B Flat's comment?