Honors Program

Honors Admission Requirements

Are you an incoming freshman who has been accepted to the UW-River Falls and are interested in the Honors Program?

Eligibility for first term, incoming freshman students: 

• Composite ACT score of 27+ or
• Graduated in the top 10% of high school class or
• Have 3.75+ high school GPA. 

Are you a current student or are you a transferring to UW-River Falls and interested in joining the Honors Program?  

Eligibility for current and transfer students: 

• Cumulative GPA of 3.3 or higher with time to complete the Honors Program requirements.

Honors Program Requirements

In order to complete the Honors Program at UW-River Falls, students who have been accepted into the program will take two Honors-specific classes and demonstrate knowledge in five core competencies:

HON 190: Honors Seminar

All Honors students enroll in HON 190 early in their UWRF career, within the first two semesters of being accepted into the program.  Taught by instructors from several departments, this one-credit seminar is the foundational class that explores why each of the five Honors competencies is important and then helps students create a personalized Honors Program plan.  

Global Engagement/Awareness

All UWRF students must complete a "Global Perspectives" (GP) class in order to graduate, so this class will count in the Honors Program.  The rest of this requirement may be earned in a variety of ways:  by completing a second "global" class, taking a 200-level+ Modern Language class (i.e. Spanish, French, German, Chinese, or Japanese), participating in a credit-bearing study abroad experience,or by completing a "portfolio project."

Communication/Rhetorical Skills

All Honors students must have strong reading, writing, and thinking skills; therefore, Honors students will take an Honors- or discipline-specific section of ENGL 200 (a General Education requirement) or will take a class that introduces students to their discipline's language that is required for their major.  Students receive a detailed list of the Communication/Rhetoric classes  in HON 190.

Community Engagement

Being active in the community--whether that is the campus community, your home community, the national community, or the global community--offers a variety of benefits to students; therefore, if students plan on graduating from the Honors Program, they must complete at least 135 volunteer hours prior to graduation.  These 135 hours may be split across all four years or done in a shorter amount of time and may be done throughout the year, including over the summer, Spring Break, or J-Term.

Sustainability

Sustainability is the study of three key areas: economic, social, and environmental justice.  Since part of our mission at UWRF is to prepare ethically-engaged citizens, all Honors students take courses that explore two of the three "pillars of Sustainability" named above.  Students will work with their instructor for HON 190 to choose classes in this requirement that also count in their major/minor and/or in their University/General Education requirements (i.e. American Cultural Diversity, Ethical Citizenship, etc.)

Undergraduate Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity (URSCA)

Another part of our mission at UWRF is to introduce students to the benefits of being involved in research and scholarly activities; therefore, to meet this requirement, students will complete an undergraduate research, scholarly, or creative activity in an upper-level class they are taking anyway to graduate, and this class that counts elsewhere in graduation requirements double counts into the Honors Program.  

HON 497: Honors Capstone Seminar

To complete the Honors Program, all Honors students must take HON 497, a class where Honors students meet once per week for 50 minutes to listen and respond to URSCA presentations by their peers in the Honors Program.  This class will be taken near the end of their program or immediately after their URSCA project has been completed. Students who know they will be off campus their final semesters must then take this class in their penultimate semester. 

Please Note...

1)  Nearly all of the classes taken in these competencies will also count in students' major/minor, General Education, and/or University requirements.  We want you to "Do Better, Not More," thus why we do not require extra projects in classes or specific sections of classes to fulfill our requirements. 

2)  In order for students to graduate with the Honors Program on their transcript, they must have at least a 3.5 cumulative GPA by graduation.

3)  Students may NOT double-count courses between the different Honors Program competencies.  For example, ESM 251 cannot count as both Communication/Rhetorical Skills and Sustainability.

4)  The Honors Program Office audits students' progress in both the fall and the spring.  If students are not making progress toward completing the Honors Program or maintaining a cumulative GPA of 3.3 or higher, they will be removed from the program after two semesters of "Honors Probation."  As noted in #2 above, students must have at least a 3.5 cumulative GPA by graduation as a program requirement.