The Hood Honors Program was established in 1990, beginning with the class of 1994. The program was designed and implemented in part to attract students who are academically highly-abled to Hood. While many applicants are academically successful, besides academic benchmark criteria, the program seeks to find in prospective honors students “that little something extra” that shows a keen intellectual curiosity and strong motivation.
The program extends across all four years; it is comprised of seminars, colloquium-based courses, Honors electives, and culminates with a senior seminar where the students chose a topic of social, political, historical, and international significance to explore in depth.
Some students are invited to write a departmental honors paper, an optional research paper on a subject of the student’s choosing. Like a graduate thesis, the paper is the product of a year’s worth of research and writing under the guidance of a faculty advisor. Departmental honors papers are presented to the campus and the public during a prestigious event in the spring.
The program seeks to create a “learning community” for honors students and holds its headquarters in the Marx Center on campus. Many group activities are planned throughout the year to create a cohesive cohort, including trips, guest speakers, community service project, and conferences. Students might find themselves in downtown Washington, D.C. at an art gallery, on the Chesapeake Bay sailing on a skipjack, or touring Boston while attending a conference. The program also encourages Honors students to travel abroad, and students have studied in locations around the globe.
