Honors Freshmen Town Hall

An honors add-on is a one-credit-hour class which is associated with a regular class that you would be taking as part of your degree that turns that class into an honors class. The number of honors credits you get for it is actually equal to the class it’s added to. So, if you're taking it with, say, history, which is a three-hour class, then you get three honors hours.

If you're taking it with chemistry, which is a five-hour class, you would get five honors hours.

You can find a description of all of our various course types here.

One of the ways you can tell that a class is an add-on is it has the number either 2890 or 3890, any class with that number. It doesn't matter what the prefix is (i.e. HONR 2890, MATH 3890), it’s going to be an add-on.

Unfortunately, not every program uses that number. For instance, the add-on for AGEC 1113 (Agricultural Economics) is AGEC 2990. Since there are add-ons that don't use that number, the best way to find out if something is add-on or not is simply to go to the Honors webpage and look on the courses for current students. (https://honors.okstate.edu/honors-course-offerings.html)

Here you will find a complete list of honors course offerings. We have three links available to follow on this page. The first will show you only the honors seminars being offered in a given semester. The second, labelled “All Honors Courses” shows every course we’re offering. On this spreadsheet, add-ons appear in blue italics. The third link will show you only the add-on courses being offered in a given semester. This will display a list of every regular course for which there is an add-on available. 

If you are still not sure about whether or not a class is an add-on, simply send us an email at honors@okstate.edu.

Every student will take two of our offered seminars over the entire four years you’re in the Honors College at OSU. Students are welcome to take more than two seminars, and many do, but that is not necessary to meet the requirements of the Honors Degree.

The point of an honors seminar is it will take you on a very, very different intellectual journey. They're the ones that have the crazy titles like, If It Wasn't True They Wouldn't Put It on the Internet, or Sex in College Culture, Living in Space, Plantation to Plate, Lizzie Borden and the Axe Murders. These are all courses that are part of the seminar series. Most seminars, not all of them, but most seminars do meet general education requirements (i.e. H, S, D, or I designation). So, when you take a seminar, you're not actually taking an “extra” class. You're taking one that checks one of those boxes towards graduation. Most seminars are three-credit-hour courses. Some are one-hour. You must have a minimum of four hours of honors seminar.

The library is doing a great job of coming up with all kinds of alternative ways to get materials to students and they have lots of updates ongoing on their website. But you can do things like arrange to have contactless pickup of library materials where you can order a book online and then you arrange to go pick it up and you go to the library and they'll bring it out, put it on a table for you. And it's just that easy. Of course, a lot of materials you might be getting might be electronic anyway. You know, that's been the case for a lot of us researchers for many years, that the majority of our materials are coming as electronic documents. And we have a library web account that you just log on and you can see the articles that you requested and the books that you requested. You can ask librarians for help online and chat with them.

They’re quite enthusiastic about helping students and they're going to make themselves available in these different ways. So, I don't think you'll have much concern there. You can also go in and use the library in the traditional way. They are open now and you can go in and access the stacks. You have certain guidelines in place like maintaining social distance and wearing your mask, of course, as you would on other parts of campus. But I think you'll find that, you know, you've got really good access there.

To maintain active status in the Honors College, students must take an honors course, complete an honors contract, or complete an honors experience each semester. Additionally, students must meet the following benchmarks:

• By the start of the Fall semester in the second year, students must accumulate a minimum of six total honors hours and/or points.
• By the start of the Fall semester in the third year, students must accumulate a minimum of fifteen total honors hours and/or points.
• By the start of the Fall semester in the fourth year, students must accumulate a minimum of twenty-four total honors hours and/or points. 

Students who fall short of the Fall semester benchmarks are allowed one semester to catch up before losing active status. To maintain active status, the student must make up the number of hours/points that they lacked and take an additional three hours/points in the Fall semester.

Students need to be active in the Honors College to be eligible for the benefits of participation, such as priority enrollment.

We do have the requirement that you stay involved in either an honors class each semester or, alternatively, you can earn honors credit via experiential learning. That’s the program we developed that allows students to get honors credit for a whole list of co-curricular activities you might be involved in. It could be anything from performing arts (like an orchestra, dance, theater) to research, leadership, service, or study abroad. These are all areas where you can apply to earn honors credit for those activities and we have a whole program where students can propose their activity.

At the beginning of each semester, we'll send out a call for proposals so just keep an eye on your emails and we will invite students to propose activities if they want to pursue honors credit. We enroll students in an online community and we give you support and talk to you about different ways you can think about the learning that's happening in that activity. We’ll encourage you to think about the moments that are transformational for you and the growth that you'll experience. Then at the end of the semester, students write a reflection on their experience and they pick out some of those key moments and you tell us how you learned and how you developed and how you grew from that activity. Those essays are wonderful. I am able to see how much education is happening beyond the classroom and that’s why we want to acknowledge those experiences by granting honors credit. So do keep an eye out for experiential learning calls for proposals and that can be a substitute for taking an honors course in a given semester or maybe over the summer you're going to pick up some extra honors credit through experiential learning. You can mix and match. I think that's one of the good things about our honors curriculum - there isn't just one path. There are lots of different pathways you can take. One student might do a lot of experiential learning and another student doesn't do any.

You can find more information (and the link to our proposal form) on our experiential learning program here. 

Study abroad is something we definitely encourage all honors students to participate in if at all possible. There are lots of ways to do it OSU. There are lots of programs in your home colleges but also through honors. You can take an honors study abroad course. Right now, study abroad is on hold for the fall. There will not be any OSU study abroad for fall semester. We are planning for spring with of course the idea to wait and see how things develop and also planning for next summer which hopefully will be something that we can do. It will pick back up sooner or later and you can do one of your honor seminar requirements as a study abroad.

You can do it with me (Dr. Frohock). I teach study abroad for our college. It’s one of my favorite things to do and we went to Grenada last summer -- that's a small island in the Caribbean. We do a special curriculum that comes out of honors practice called Place-as-Text so it's very much open to students from all disciplines. We explore life and culture in a very broad sense when we go to these different places. Then each student can kind of pick an area that they're interested in that they want to do a deeper dive on their own. So, you can watch for those opportunities, but you can also get honors study abroad credit if you did one through Spears Business or through Engineering. We have lots of mechanisms for getting you credit. There's not just one pathway to doing that. 

Study abroad courses offered by the Honors College will be listed with the rest of our course offerings on this page. Honors study abroad courses are listed as seminars.

You can find OSU's study abroad webpage here.

Absolutely. We will move you in and out of the program as it works for you. There’s no negative to doing a couple of semesters and deciding, “I don't want to do this.” I mean, we prefer you wouldn't do that but if that's how you feel that's OK.

Sometimes you will get in a position where you simply cannot put an honors class into your schedule. When that happens, however, you really need to work with your honors advisor because we can and we do have a mechanism to keep you active in honors during that semester. That happens because there are sometimes points when you really can't do it. So don’t feel that you have to drop honors. Talk to your advisor first because there may be a way around it that will keep you active and keep you on track with honors and the reason to do that is if you're active you have priority registration. And if there's one thing that's a huge perk particularly for you during the first couple of years, it's having that priority registration. Hopefully you didn't have too tough of a time when you went through New Student Orientation, but if you were one of those unfortunate people who couldn't get classes to fit and all that sort of stuff, that won't happen again. As an honors student everything will be wide open when you register in the fall and it will be really easy to get the courses you need at the times that you want.

We understand that you guys are coming into college under very different circumstances from a lot of people and that with social distance protocols being in place that it's not going to look at the same as normal years. We do have some things planned in particular for our freshmen. Next week is Welcome Week and I know some of you are probably moving onto campus either this weekend or early next week to participate in those activities. Welcome Week is from August 12-16 and while most of that will be done virtually or socially distanced, we will have some of our own honors activities.

One of the things we're planning is going to be a virtual game night with the platform Jackbox. We're also planning on having some sign-ups and doing some games like virtual bingo and virtual taboo. During Welcome Week we're also doing a pub poll option, which is a Family Feud style game where you try to guess the most popular response. We will also have a couple of events involving current students so you all can talk to students across different majors and you all can connect with them as well.

During the semester, hopefully (we will find out tomorrow) you will be able to engage with Huxley and Darwin who are our Pete’s Pet Posse therapy dogs. If it’s safe to do so we will bring them on campus and you will have the opportunity to hang out with and love on the dogs. We will be sending out emails about being able to interact with the dogs.

One other thing that we're talking about doing is having a seminar series throughout the semester where we will showcase different offices like Tutoring Services, Student Government Association, Counseling Services, Research, Study Abroad, etc. These are things that we feel are important for our current students to be connected with. We will invite them to do some virtual events with us so that you all are aware of other offices and different opportunities you have on campus. So while we might not be able to meet with everybody in as big of group as we traditionally do, we're definitely working on engaging with you all virtually.

One more thing I will mention that is brand new is Slack. Slack is a platform where we're going to post announcements about things from priority enrollment to special events that we're doing with honors. We’re working on getting it up and running. Once we have all of the groups created in Slack, we will email everyone so you can have information about the app that you can download.

My boss, Dr. Garbutt, will be giving one of the best speeches I have ever heard in the 12 years I've been a part of higher ed. He is going to be recording the speech he usually gives at the Dean’s Welcome during Welcome Week, but this year we will be doing it virtually. Next Friday at 1:30pm we will post it to our honors website. Then from 2:00 to 2:45pm next Friday (8/14) we will have another interactive question and answer session with our incoming freshmen and with some of our current honors students as well as our faculty and staff. So those are some events that we have planned. Dr. Garbutt’s Dean’s Welcome will be in the guidebook that is coming out for Welcome Week in the next couple days and then we will send you all emails and sign-up sheets for our other Welcome Week events here in the next couple days.

In terms of honors, we will send out emails from our listserv so watch out for that when you get a notice that says you on the honors listserv. Once we get Slack up and running, we will probably still send stuff out over the listserv for those people who don't utilize it but the beauty of Slack is we can be much more focused with the way in which we send our messages than we are with the listserv. 

In terms of the stuff for Welcome Week that the university is doing, we are finishing up proposals and putting things together for Welcome Week and your colleges will have College Spotlights and they will have opportunities to engage with you virtually and in person. You will do a class photo socially distanced in Boone Pickens Stadium. The Welcome Week information should be coming by email by the end of this week I believe and there will be a virtual guide that will have all of the events that we’ll be hosting just for freshman. It will involve some current students, faculty, and staff, but all the events are going to be geared towards freshmen. Check your emails as you're getting ready to move in. We should have the Welcome Week guide up and running in next couple days.  

General Welcome Week information as well as the virtual guidebook can be found here. 

Because you'll have a lot of opportunities to do virtual games and things like that, I thought it would be nice to compliment that with some outdoor physical activities. So, there will be a couple of things on our Welcome Week lineup. I hope some of you are runners like I am and would like to join me for a run one morning and maybe we'll go to a location in Stillwater like Boomer Lake. If you don't know Stillwater, we actually have some really cool outdoor spaces and they're not far from the center of town. So, I'm going to organize a couple of those, maybe early morning run or walk if you prefer. It doesn't matter how fast or hard you want to go, everyone's welcome.

Then maybe I thought I’d have like an evening walk in the Botanic Gardens. OSU has some amazing gardens just a mile or so from campus. It’s shaded and lovely and you could get to know that space right away because you might want to take advantage of it over the next few years as a kind of easy retreat to nature. They have lots of research going on there of course as well but it's also very much for the community to enjoy. We could go check that out and stroll around a bit when the sun’s not burning with full intensity but maybe a little bit later in the evening. So do watch out for those. We typically will host some of those throughout the semester.

In the past we have reserved the climbing wall for honor students. Students sign up and we go there and just climb for a couple of hours. It is a blast. If you haven't done it before I really recommend it. You don't have to have any previous experience. It’s just really fun. They have all different challenges on the one wall so you can start on a beginner row or you can do something extraordinarily difficult if you're more advanced. I’d really love to see some of you at Welcome Week at some of those events. As the semester continues, we can get out and be within the guidelines of meeting face-to-face outdoors and have some fun.

From my understanding, a lot of sorority recruitment events will be held scattered throughout the day, but a lot of our honors activities during Welcome Week will be after hours. We're looking at doing a lot of our activities, especially our games, after 5pm so you all have time to grab dinner and hang out and join us online. So hopefully there will be some opportunities for those who are going through security recruitment to also participate in these activities.

We will be planning our seminar series and things throughout the fall semester after 5pm as well so hopefully a lot of you will be out of class. I will also mention we have an Honors Student Association that is run by our students. They have been very active on campus. They do a lot of stuff with like homecoming (which I know homecoming is not going to be a thing this year but lucky for you guys we will be postponing until 2021 so you can take part in our big celebration) but they do a lot of things with homecoming, they do volunteer events on campus and things like that. So you will also be able to get involved with our Honors College through the Honors Student Association. As our officers come back to school and plan their activities for Fall 2020 you guys will start getting information about that and how to sign up for events. Hopefully by spring things have cleared up a little bit more because they always do a really skate date night in the spring semester at the Roller Dome, which also has laser tag and video games and things like that. If you're looking for more ways to get involved leadership-wise with the honors program, we will have the Honors Student Association that you can participate in.

You can find more information on our Honors College Student Association (HCSA) here. 

As far as we know, yes and since they put a new elevator into Stout Hall this summer it’s actually likely to work as well (haha). Obviously, there will be some rules about how many people you can put in the elevator. Probably members of a family could crowd in there, but you don't want two families in at the same time, that sort of thing.

Yeah that's a good question. There are so many different ways you can do study abroad that there are options for students who do have a very tight curriculum like engineering students for example. You could do a traditional year or semester abroad where you take courses at a foreign University and a lot of our students do that and that's a wonderful thing if you can manage that. You will want to plan that early on and talk to your advisor right away if this some goal that you have and start thinking about how that would look. But there are also lots of short-term courses that you can fit very easily into a schedule. There are, for example, summer trips. So when I teach study abroad it's usually a two-week summer study abroad and it doesn't interfere with the courses you’re taking in the regular semester. It's an additional course you can pick up in the summer and it will also carry some Gen Ed designations with it. So, if you need your International Studies credit, you could save that and earn it when you do a study abroad and then it's going to count on your degree sheet. My courses are also Humanities general education credits so you could pick up that requirement at the same time and it’s a seminar, so you get lots of boxes checked off with that one class in the summer. There are also spring break courses, and these are a really a great model because the travel occurs just over spring break. The great thing about the spring ones is you get to learn about and prepare for your travel for eight weeks before spring break comes and then you go travel and then you come back and you've got this wonderful experience that you can write about or reflect on and continue to read about the place we visited. So that again also fits nicely into a semester and could be used to pick up some Gen Ed requirements or honors requirements. The short-term study abroad courses can certainly fit into very busy degree plans

Some majors actually have things you can slide in. With engineering, there's a program at the University of Hartford, which is a huge engineering school in Britain, and usually students go to that in their second or third semester and get a bunch of their engineering requirements completed. Surprisingly for premed the best time to go is your very final semester because at that point you know that either you’re in Med school or you’re not and if you talk to your advisor, we can fit everything together so you basically get everything done and you could just go away and and have a blast, maybe pick up a minor even if you've completed everything for your major. It’s important to talk to advisors early about study abroad because there are some majors where you need to go early if you're going to do a semester and others where the last semester is the best one to go. Talk to a specialist in the area and they’ll tell you what works best and don't be afraid to take advantage of the summer courses. There are some great summer programs and some great ones that go out over the winter break as well. Hopefully Dr. DeSilva will be willing to do his Sri Lanka trip again in the future. That was a huge success last time we did it.

Students who are engineers or pre-med also have opportunities to do OSU programs like Engineers Without Borders or Global Brigades. We’ve had honors students in recent summers participate in those volunteer projects abroad. They're not doing a course, but they can get honors experiential learning credit for that service that they're doing abroad. We have engineering students who went to Guatemala and they helped with a water collection system. It used rooftops in a village to collect rainwater, filter it, and then that was a freshwater source for the people that lived in that village. The Global Brigades students go to low-income areas and they will work in a clinic side by side with doctors and they'll get a wonderful insight into what healthcare looks like in another part of the world. You can get honors credit for those experiences even if they're not coursework.

As you're going through your undergraduate careers you may start getting internships or doing shadowing hours or something like that. We see a lot of those start around June 1^st. We do intersession classes in May so our study abroad intersession courses would take off right after school finishes in May and be back around Memorial Day. So, if you have an internship or shadowing experience or summer school that starts June 1^st, we can get you on a study abroad trip before you would need to start that.

The Spears School of Business is one of the strongest in terms of their study abroad offerings as a college. They have many, many programs and they usually have more than one course number that you can sign up for depending on what you particularly need for your degree. So, one trip may have students on it completing different business courses.

Dr. Wiser goes to Italy every spring break and he's been doing this for many years with his wife, Angela, who's an advisor in business and she's also second-generation American Italian so she's their translator while they're there. But they do a fabulous trip where the focus is on learning what corporations look like in Italy, what a small business looks like in Italy, they visit a lot of sort of “mom and pop” shops as well and they see some of the ideas about how business is set up and run in a different culture. They go and see some major cities in a very short period of time but that's a fantastic one and it will fit multiple degree sheets depending on what you need. They have a trip to Iceland also over spring break. They have a great many that you could take advantage of so do check those out if you're in the School of Business. You can go by their Global Studies office which is right inside when you go in the building. They've got this really nice office and you can learn about all the different programs that they will be offering.

Some trips are also domestic. Students can do a reciprocal change where they will go to a different University in the United States. I had one student in Florida last year and one in Hawaii the year before. I have one who's in Alaska and I'm not quite sure I've gotten him back yet. He’s been in Alaska for a year like he just went to Alaska and fell in love.

We have exchanges as well with international universities and also here in the United States. A couple of study abroad trips that Spears has done was an accounting trip that went to Disney World and looked at the financial background of Disney and how their accounting departments worked. They got to look at how a large corporation like Disney World operates from an accounting standpoint which is not something most people would get to do. They've also taken similar trips to New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, and a couple other places so there are also some of these trips that stay in the United States and partner up with other universities.

More information regarding studying abroad with the Spears School of Business can be found on their website, here.

The University has a broad array of scholarships for study abroad. Currently we don't have an honors specific scholarship for study abroad. Although there are scholarships that go along with the Cowboys in Cambridge program which tends to be dominated by honors students. It's very unusual that there's more than one or two non-honors students in Cowboys in Cambridge program and most students who do that end up with a scholarship to help cover the costs.

Study Abroad Office funding resources, here.

Information on the Cowboys in Cambridge program, here.

In terms of honors courses over the summer, besides study abroad, we have one entomology course that's been a very popular one, but we've not had much else because honors tends to be face-to-face courses. I suspect that given faculty are moving some of their honors stuff online in response to Covid, the fallout from that might be that we now have more stuff happening over the summer. Over the summer, students prefer remote classes rather than in-person. So, no promises at this point but an upside of Covid might be that we expand our summer offerings because the professors have put the courses together and it's relatively easy to do something over the summer.

We do have an Oklahoma Scholar Leadership Enrichment Program (OSLEP) that is offered through our Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education on OU’s campus. Every year in partnership with them, we offer several seminar classes that students can take and a couple of them occur during the summer, during winter break, and during spring break. The program offers a five-day intensive class that focuses on one particular topic. You would pay OSU tuition and fees for the course so it would be under the block tuition rate that we charge if you take it in the fall or the spring. Summer is a different beast when it comes to financial aid so that’s a little bit different, but the program will cover your books and your room and board at OU (if it happens to be offered in-person). So, you would be housed on campus there, they feed you while you're there, and then you would take a five-day class and get honors seminar credit. I know we've got 2 OSLEP courses running in the fall so far, but we tend to offer two or three in the fall and two or three in the spring. One went to New Mexico a couple years ago and did an art-based seminar out there. The year before they did more of an English writing workshop out there. We did one on Taco Literacy this last year so like tacos and literature which is actually a really cool class. So that's another way you can earn honors credit during the summer and during the school year. Your honors advisor will have more information about that. 

Another domestic study abroad option is the Doel Reed Center for the Arts which offers courses every summer so it's another summer opportunity. The professors are generally quite willing to do honors contracts so if you do take one of those courses you can get honors credit through one mechanism or another. If you happen to be an English major or you have a major in Art, there are scholarships designated for students in those particular areas. They tend to be very economical for a 3-hour class and you get to go to Taos, NM which is amazingly beautiful.

There’s an honors experience called Partners in the Parks which is run by the National Collegiate Honors Council. It is a really cool experience. It’s an academic experience within one of the national parks. Some of them are wilderness experiences but some of them are in the urban national parks. There was one that went to Philadelphia and did the Freedom Trail National Park and I had another student who went to one on Ellis Island. They go places like Yosemite and Big Ben at odd times in the year, but they also go to places like Ellis Island. As soon as they start up again we’ll send out information. They’re very intense five-day courses and they're also very cheap. If you do them you will get honors seminar credit for those courses so another great opportunity. There are also scholarships for those through our national honor council and through our regional honors council as well so we do have opportunities for those to be mostly covered with scholarship funds from different organizations that we’re involved in outside of our University.

Find more information on:

OSLEP

Doel Reed Center

Partners in the Parks

Please double check your schedules if you have not already. We have had some movement with classes in terms of time, some have moved online, some have changed buildings and rooms. If you have any questions about your classes, email our honors account. During the first couple of days of school, we will have “wayfinders” who can point you in the right direction. But please check your schedules before you get here so if we need to make any adjustments, we can help you do that.

You have until the Monday after school starts to change classes with no penalty, so you have until that Monday to drop and add classes with the guidance of your honors and major advisors. You can start buying textbooks when you get here. The bookstore will be open next week. You can start doing charges and things like that.

Consider making your Walmart trip before you get to Stillwater. Walmart typically gets packed during move-in week so you may want to avoid the crowds and waiting in long lines. You will get your student ID's when you check-in and do your Covid testing.

I will also mention as well that you all of our advising will be virtual this semester so you're going to use Zoom a lot. All of your office hours with your professors will be held via Zoom even if you're having an in-person class, as will any/all tutoring sessions. So be on the lookout for emails from us on how that’s going to work and how we can make sure that we are giving you that one-on-one experience even if we can't quite see you face-to-face all the time just yet. I have to say when we started talking about moving tutoring to the Zoom platform, we realized it would probably be more convenient for you through that platform than the way we've been doing in the past where you have to sometimes go between buildings to get the help you need. So once again, the way in which we've been forced to adapt with Covid sometimes it’s turning out to be a good thing.