USM Honors Program

Our Mission

USM Honors is an academically intensive learning community providing an in depth interdisciplinary approach to general education for students who are willing and able to be challenged. We are committed to small discussion-based classes in which students develop critical thinking skills while building collaborative relationships with fellow students and faculty.

Benefits

• Our small, seminar-style courses give you the opportunity to work closely with other similarly engaged students and to be mentored by your teachers.
• You will be invited to pull together and make sense of what you’re learning in college while you deepen and sustain your thinking—reflectively, analytically, critically and imaginatively.
• Write more coherently and know your own voice.
• Learn how to field questions, to lead discussions and to give public presentations with confidence.
• You will know how to design and carry out personal, complex projects, start to finish.
• When you graduate from USM with the Honors distinction you will be prepared and positioned for graduate or professional school or for pursuit of your chosen career.

The USM Honors Program Learning Objectives

The learning goals of the program focus on the integration of five related objectives, expressed in terms of dispositions, skills, values, and areas of knowledge and understanding in an effort to nurture "Intentional Learners."

• Community: Honors students participate actively in communities of learning, and are predisposed to the common goal of shared learning. They are empowered learners, who are committed to the practice of dialogue as a way of life, as a way of building community, and as way of fostering individual and collective learning.  
• Communication: Honors Students advocate positions effectively through intertextual, original, imaginative, written and oral communication, and through performances or demonstrations of collaborative learning with diverse audiences.  
• Wellness/Meaningful Life: An Honors student develops his/her unique and full potential personally, intellectually and interpersonally, by valuing and promoting human wellness.
• Interdisciplinary Learning: Honors students demonstrate multiple ways to interpret scholarly writing, engage in civic action and pursue interdisciplinary research.  
• Engaged Inquiry: Reading, Writing, Action and Research: Honors students learn actively through interdisciplinary processes of engaged inquiry. They exercise the capacity to identify, describe, analyze, and critique qualitative and quantitative arguments.

The USM Honors Program is a member of the National Collegiate Honors Council and Northeast Regional Honors Council.