Program Goals
The goals for this program are predominantly student-driven, but when taken collectively, they also hold promise for the larger campus community. Our primary goals are:
- to offer suitable challenges and opportunities to highly motivated and committed students.
- to provide these students with engaging intellectual environments to facilitate the growth of strong academic skills.
- to provide a context in which students explore connections between theory and practice, in part by completing service-based experiential learning exercises framed in the community interest.
- to provide an intellectual context in which students learn to connect or integrate ideas and methods across disciplines, especially as a basis for developing versatile interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving.
- to provide opportunities for faculty to serve as personal research mentors to highly motivated, broadly trained students.
- to impart through these experiences a lasting love and enthusiasm for learning, the confidence and ability to think for themselves, and a lifelong commitment to promote the well-being of human communities.
Overall, the Stanislaus University Honors Program reflects many of the core academic values we would like to see reflected in every student's quest for higher learning. These values include helping students:
- build creative intellectual aptitudes around strong academic skills in reading, speaking, thinking and writing.
- appreciate service-based experiential learning activities as a valuable complement to intellectual endeavors.
- develop a capacity for independent research and constructive teamwork.
- develop the aptitude for applying congruent research methods and analytical frameworks to problems of serious social consequence, in the service of authentic community interests.