Honors Program
253.535.8648
www.plu.edu/~spac/honors/link1.htm

Course Offerings

The Honors Program at Pacific Lutheran University centers on the theme Taking Responsibility: Matters of the Mind, Matters of the Heart. It integrates academic and experiential learning opportunities, with the objective of preparing participants for lives of service and servant leadership. The program emphasizes the importance of student-directed learning, and culminates in an experiential project that students design, implement, and evaluate (with faculty support).

Total Honors Credits: 26 semester hours (all but 8 of which fulfill other university requirements)

Honors students: Selected on the basis of grades and scores (high school grade point average of 3.80 and 1250+ SAT scores) or 28+ (ACT scores), recommendations, and commitment to program theme. Must complete PLU with a minimum of 3.50 grade point average.

First Year - All entering first-year honors students take the First-year Honors Experience:

1. Honors Core sequence: Identity, Community, Legacy, and Faith
   115 Identity, Community, Legacy, and Faith (fall; 4 hours)
   116 Identity, Community, Legacy, and Faith (spring; 4 hours)
2. Honors Critical Conversation: Experience and Knowledge
   117A Experience and Knowledge (fall; 1 hour)
   117B Experience and Knowledge (spring; 1 hour)
   Note: At the end of the first year, students in the Honors core choose to enter Core I or Core II. The 8 credits in the First-year Honors Experience will have equivalencies in both cores.

Sophomore and Junior Years

1. During the sophomore and junior years students take four 1-credit Virtue Seminars (Honors 301-308), or preferably one each semester (or multiples in a semester to accommodate study abroad or other scheduling conflicts). Continuing the focus on Taking Responsibility, the seminars focus on those qualities necessary to responsible leadership. Using different virtues as a centering theme, students consider each virtue from several perspectives, including classical, contemporary, and non-western perspectives. What does it mean to be a person who acts wisely? courageously? with hope? justly? These seminars provide students with a weekly opportunity to interact with their intellectual peers around a unifying theme and readings.
2. Participation in January term study abroad/off-campus courses is strongly encouraged but not required. Most participants in the J-term abroad will be sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
3. Honors students take two 4-credit courses usually during the sophomore and/or junior years. They may take Honors-by-Contract courses, whose added dimensions to convert them to honors are agreed upon in a contract between professor and student, by the following means:
1. take a regularly scheduled course which, by contract, explores the topic through greater depth or breadth, or
2. do an independent study or research project (may do only one of these) whose finished product is of potentially publishable quality.

Senior Year - Seniors take Honors 499 Capstone: Honors Challenge Experience (4 hours), offered in January term. This seminar, including academic analysis and an experiential component, brings a sense of closure to the program theme of responsibility, and is called Responsibility in Action.

Foreign Language - Students completing the program and graduating with university honors must have met Option I or II of the College of Arts and Sciences language requirement; only music education majors are exempted from this requirement.

Back to topCourse Offerings

115 Identity, Community, Legacy, and Faith
Social, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual traditions of Europe and North America, with attention to relevant interactions and comparisons between Western and non-Western civilizations. (4)

116 Identity, Community, Legacy, and Faith
Social, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual traditions of Europe and North America, with attention to relevant interactions and comparisons between Western and non-Western civilizations. (4)

117A Experience and Knowledge - CC
Explores the connections between understanding a selected issue or problem through traditional academic study and understanding the same issue or problem through experience. Taken as two sections in sequence. (1, 1)

301-308 Virtue Seminars
Continuing its focus on Taking Responsibility, the Honors Program offers seminars that focus on those qualities necessary to responsible leadership. (Each seminar is 1 credit; honors students are required to complete four.) (1 hour each)

301 Charity
302 Courage
303 Faith
304 Hope
305 Justice
306 Self-Restraint
307 Wisdom
308 Compassion

499 Capstone: Honors Challenge Experience: Responsibility in Action - SR
This culminating element of the Honors Program presents the opportunity to take responsibility by emphasizing the significance of bringing together habits of scholarship and habits of committed citizenship-of linking the academic components of research, study, and writing in applied experiences in public venues. (4)