Courses and Program Requirements

Honors Courses

Honors courses (designated HON) are taught by some of NJCU’s best faculty, from a wide range of departments across four colleges/schools. Many of the courses are connected to each other in learning communities, ensuring an educational experience that recognizes the complex and interrelated way knowledge is produced and consumed in the contemporary world. Many Honors courses are enrolled in a cohort model. This builds community among students, as each incoming cohort of students takes many classes together with their Honors student peers. Honors courses are open only to students in the Honors Program. Examples of past Honors courses include:

• Ancient Greek Philosophy
• Black Berlin
• Climate Change and Environmental Aspects of Small Tropical Island Nations
• Food, Place, and Cultural Performance in Peru
• Forensics
• Global Political Economy
• Historic Preservation in the Global City: New York, Shanghai, Beijing
• Honors Ethics
• Recycling and Recirculating in Different Media
• Trial Advocacy and the American Legal System

 

Program Requirements: The Honors Core Curriculum — 32 credits

The Honors experience is holistic, engaging students academically, socially, and professionally. The Honors Core Curriculum is central to that experience. The Honors Core substitutes for NJCU's General Education, so Honors students do not take General Education but instead take the Honors Core. Given this detail, the Honors Core has breadth, depth, and offers an integrated set of interdisciplinary courses, combining methodologies and topics from various disciplines. In alignment with General Education, Honors Core courses are defined by four Modes of Inquiry:

• Creative Process and Production (CPP)
• Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies (LLC)
• Scientific and Quantitative Inquiries (SQI)
• Social and Historical Perspectives (SHP)

 

The Honors Core is 32 credits distributed over four years, scheduled as follows:

• Four 100-level HON courses, in varied Modes, taken in freshman year (12 credits)  
• Four 200-level HON courses, 1 in each Mode, taken sophomore & junior years (12 credits)  
• One 300-level HON course, preferably with embedded study abroad (3 credits)
• One 400-level HON Capstone course, taken Junior Spring or Senior Fall (3 credits)
• Two 1-credit Professional Development courses (2 credits)