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20 years of Honors

Northern Michigan University looking to expand program

This is the Honors Program’s fall 2017 trip to Minneapolis to see "Romeo and Juliet" and visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The program is celebrating its 20th anniversary. (Photo courtesy of NMU)

MARQUETTE — The Northern Michigan University’s Honors Program, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, is poised to grow even more in the coming years.

Northern’s Honors Program was established in the fall 1998 semester with 12 students; it has since grown to 327 participants, expanding both in scope and function.

There’s a reason “Honors” is in its title: The program provides NMU’s brightest students with access to top teaching faculty over all four years, and to courses that offer increasing opportunities for specialization in their areas of interest.

“All majors are represented within the program, so it’s not for a specific major. It’s for all majors,” said David Wood, Honors Program director and professor of English who took over the program in 2010.

Students embark on an interdisciplinary curriculum that allows them to earn general education credits in small, discussion-based courses. In their final two years, they begin earning Honors credit by individualizing courses within their majors.

“They’re all taught by actual professors, so nothing is taught by graduate assistants or teaching assistants,” Wood said. “Everything’s taught by faculty.”

He even handpicks the people who teach the lower-level classes, which tend to be writing-intensive, discussion-based courses.

The third and fourth years, though, shift to a different academic model.

“Students start to earn Honors credit in their upper-level classes, so they start to single out specific faculty to work with, doing projects in their major area of interest,” Wood said. “A student who’s interested in pre-med might be working in our Upper Michigan Brain Tumor Center.”

Not only do Honors participants have good access to faculty, he said they obtain that with increasing specialization so they have good opportunities to develop professional relationships that will facilitate strong experiences as well as letters of recommendation when they apply for graduate school.

Of course, potential Honors students need to have had a certain amount of achievement to be admitted to the program.

Wood said the basic minimum requirements for admittance are around a 27 on the ACT test, which equates to a 1260 on the new SAT, as well as a 3.5 grade point average in high school. A student also needs two letters of support from faculty, coaches or people who can attest to the student’s character.

“These are students who by and large could go to an awful lot of the best schools in the country,” Wood said. “Many of them are attracted to Northern itself. They’re attracted to the Upper Peninsula.”

He pointed out that almost all Honors Program students go on to graduate school. In fact, this year students have been accepted to Georgetown Law School and the University of Michigan Medical School.

“When you come to a school that’s entirely dedicated to undergraduate education like ours, I guess the best way to look at it is there aren’t any doctoral students in the way, and so the faculty really want to work with the brightest undergraduates they can,” Wood said.

The Honors Program is a high priority at NMU.

The Strategic Resource Allocation Report draft recently was released in which academic priorities were listed, with one of those priorities being the creation of an Honors College.

The draft report read: “The explosive growth of Northern’s current Honors Program makes this the appropriate time for this change. This College would strategically enhance the honors student experience, increase NMU’s enrollment and expand Northern’s overall reputation.”

“More” is a key word here.

“It tends to mean more, more of everything — more students, but along with more students, more funding, more student opportunities for both curricular and extracurricular travel,” Wood said.

The idea, he said, is to create an incentive for students to join.

“It’s going to be many years in the making,” Wood said. “This is not something you can rush into.”

Moving forward with the initiative to create more student learning opportunities will involve university and private funding, said Wood, who pointed out the program brings in 80 new freshmen each fall. The hope is that turning it into an Honors College would come close to doubling those numbers in five to 10 years.

The Honors College also would involve being in a centralized location with Honors classrooms, he said.

“It’ll be a serious investment,” Wood said.

Alumni have expressed gratitude for being part of the Honors Program.

“The small class sizes and off-the-beaten path topics and writing prompts made it both interesting and a challenge to engage in studying subjects other than my passion: science,” said alumna Emily Burghardt, who is pursuing a doctorate in biology, in a news release. “However, the real difference that the program made in my life was the professors I had the honor to work with.”

Alumna Charlotte Cialek, who plans to become a biological data scientist in the genomics industry after graduate school, said in a news release: “The content that didn’t pertain to my major helped mold me in to who I am today. Some of my favorite memories include an entire semester on Don Quixote and traveling to the Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. The ideas in the Honors classes also helped open my mind about complicated topics in science.”

Wood has been joined in the Honors Program by Assistant Director Michael Joy, professor of Spanish, who has integrated the award-winning NMU Quiz Bowl team he advises within the Honors Program.

Discussions with the Honors student organization have led to two other recent developments.

The “Honors Atelier” is a social and meeting space in the Olson Library, which is used for release parties for the second development: the undergraduate journal, Conspectus Borealis. Based on the Latin term for “a Northern perspective,” this annual journal attracts campus-wide, faculty-approved, undergraduate academic work spanning all academic majors. Honors Program students select and edit the blind submissions.

Former NMU Trustee Mary L. Campbell established a scholarship fund that was critical to the formation of the Honors Program two decades ago. Sustained support from private donors has contributed to its growth and success. The “John and Shirley Berry Annual Scholarship” draws upon a $5 million gift to attract business majors and students majoring in fields relating to STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The Anna and Rich Lundin Summer Research Fellowships fund five $5,000 awards to support upper-level, faculty-mentored research projects each year.

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