The University Honors Program sustains a community of scholars intellectually engaged with each other and with faculty mentors who are inspired by academic challenge, complex questions, and the desire to make a difference in the world. Available to students in all undergraduate schools of the University, the Honors Program inspires thoughtful, responsible citizens in scholarship and the professions. Small, seminar-style classes, capped at 20 students, provide the challenge to probe a variety of evolving issues. 

Offering a compelling intellectual experience, including intensive immersion in the great traditions of learning, the University Honors Program helps students hone their analytic and expressive powers, deepen their understandings, broaden their perspectives, and spark their passions, curiosity and personal aspirations. Built upon a coherent and comprehensive four-year honors experience, the Program is fully integrated into, synergistic with, and reinforcing of, the highest academic aspirations of the schools and departments. The motto of the University Honors Program is "dig deeper, climb higher, see farther...."

The honors program does not replace the entire academic experience at GW.  Students follow an honors course sequence in their first and second years which represents eight or twelve credits each semester in the first year and eight credits each semester in the second.  In the third and fourth years of the University Honors Program, students engage in special or departmental honors in their majors. To graduate as a University Honors Program Scholar, all Honors Program students must qualify for departmental honors.

• In recognition of their expanded scope and interdisciplinary nature as well as greater academic expectations of students both in and outside of class, honors courses carry four credits rather than the typical three credits.
  

• All honors students must participate in an Honors Global Issues practicum, a senior year capstone experience. The practicum provides students with the opportunity to apply and reflect upon what they have learned in the course of their undergraduate experience.
  

• The honors community is strengthened and sustained by a shared academic experience and by its limitation to approximately five percent of the undergraduate student body, fewer than 500 students. The program offers first-year honors students the option of living in one of the honors residential communities.

• The Honors Program experience is enriched throughout the academic year by distinctive co-curricular programming. This past year, through the "Professors on the Town," small groups of interested honors students and faculty attend or visited numerous theater productions such as a concert at the Black Cat club in Adams Morgan, the National Mosque, the Folger Shakespeare Theater's Passion Plays and Measure for Measure, the Koshland Science Museum, and Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello, in Charlottesville. The program sponsored University Honors Symposia, "Who's Afraid of Intelligent Design" and "Sex, Art, and the American University," as well as Professors in the Pub debates on such topics as "God and Government."
• Admission to the University Honors Program is by application. Click here for application requirements.