Director’s Welcome
Prof. Maureen Kelleher
Welcome to the University Honors Program. Last year, we celebrated our 25th anniversary as a university-wide program. We had great fun sponsoring “25 Ways to Celebrate Honors” – which was the theme for our year. Now we are on to our next 25!
We are an academic unit on campus charged with creating and sustaining a student community by responding to their needs to be challenged and fulfilled through their experiences on campus. While we are only one resource among many on campus that students rely on, our particular mission is to provide academically enriching opportunities and significant programming that will meet goals of support, challenge, and student-defined success.
Our web site is a resource where we have gathered information for current or prospective students. Northeastern University offers wonderful opportunities to pursue a wide range of academic fields, many of them linked to national and/or global sites where you can also study and work. This is an exciting time to be a student here. Within the larger university, the Honors Program offers a unique academic opportunity, focusing primarily on our thematic-focused First Year Inquiry Series and our upper class Honors Interdisciplinary Seminar series. Many students do advanced research in their major as their final academic work in honors. In addition, we offer many classes at the college level. Our courses are the foundation of your experience in the program. They bring together excellent faculty, innovative topics, an interdisciplinary focus, and of course – the key ingredient – the energy and exciting ideas of our scholars.
We also are committed to the building of a community in honors. We approach that goal through a variety of programming opportunities that help to link us together in a number of ways, starting each year with our Welcome Week experience that brings together our new and upper class students. Welcome Week starts everyone working together from the day they arrive on campus. We cap off our academic year with Honors Evening, which showcases advanced student research and where we celebrate our graduating seniors. Throughout the rest of the year there are many chances to connect with one another on a number of activities ranging from monthly Pizza and Profs to the significant civic engagement accomplished each year in Boston through the Honors Outreach Project (the HOP).
With Residential Life, we have collaborated on a Living Learning Community (LLC) that is located in International Village. Programs are developed and linked to the four academic themes developed in our First Year Inquiry Series by our two Faculty-in-Residence living there and the Residential Directors and Honors Resident Assistants who support the goals of the Honors LLC.
At any one time, I can tick off any number of places our students are in the world –studying textiles in Mumbai, sustainable housing in Argentina, ants in Panama, hemoglobin levels in Peru, gorillas in our local zoo, or WW II spies in Russia. But more importantly, in our day-to-day interactions on campus, we work with students who are able to meet the challenges of a rigorous undergraduate curriculum, willing to commit to building a community on campus and beyond, and open to what is possible to accomplish.
My staff and I work to provide you tools to make your time at the University Honors Program supported, challenged, and successful. Please let us know what we can do to help you on your journey.
