The University Honors Program’s fall curriculum will include two additional living-learning programs, with new focuses on entrepreneurship and computer science joining existing technology, humanities and interdisciplinary curricula.
The new two-year Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program will be headed by Jay Smith, who himself founded a multimillion-dollar creative services company right out of business school. Students in the program will be in an environment in which they can generate profitable ideas by building off of those living with them, Smith said.
“Something happens when you put students thinking in the same way together,” Smith said. “Everyone gets ideas at different times, not singularly in a classroom setting. … This system gives the opportunity for ideas to be shared and bounced around during non-classroom hours.”
The program’s students — split evenly among business majors, engineering majors and students from other fields of study — are required to fulfill 10 credits of EIP courses and two Honors seminars for a total of 16 credits.
The other new Honors program that launches in the fall, Digital Cultures and Creativity, attracted attention in the spring when the university promised each of its 75 students a free iPad tablet computer.
Program director Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor who teaches courses on electronic literature and new media such as online books and electronic book readers, said the digital cultures courses are “aimed at the so-called ‘digital native,’ or the kids who have grown up with the computer and the web, but are not necessarily interested in programming or computer science.”
“A lot of time people think that computers and literature don’t go together, but when you think about it, they really do,” Kirschenbaum said. “People go into humanities because they don’t like technology, but today you really can’t separate them. This program is a good way to combine creativity and art with technology.”
The digital cultures program requires 16 credits during the first two years at the university, including a practicum that culminates in a major project.
All incoming Honors students are now chosen for one of the college’s five programs — the new offerings or the existing Honors Humanities, Gemstone or the more generic University Honors — based both on their individual preferences and decisions by Honors officials.
Provost Nariman Farvardin, whose office has helped fund the new Honors programs, said they were created to expand the reach of the honors program to interest and excite students.
“These new programs promise to be exciting additions to the Honors College and have been very successful in attracting highly talented students to the university,” Farvardin wrote in an e-mail.
Margaret Zheng, an incoming freshman finance major enrolled in the program, said she appreciated the university’s focus on connecting students outside the classroom.
“I thought living-learning was pretty cool,” Zheng said. “It makes it really convenient for things like projects and study-buddies, because everyone you live with will be taking a lot of the same classes. It’s just really a comfort knowing someone like me will be in walking distance.”
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