Honors students arrive on campus with immense energy and potential, and with a proven readiness to pursue personal and professional growth. All of this energy and potential requires a network of powerful connections and a flexible framework that can help students not only articulate their most compelling ideas, goals, and ambitions, but help them transform their ideas into action, their goals into accomplishments, and their ambitions into evidence. In the Honors College, we power this transformation in multiple ways, but it all starts with the Honors First-Year Experience Courses–Beyond George Street (HONS 100) and Honors Engaged (HONS 103 A and B).
Beyond George Street (BGS) is a series of Keynotes and Synthesis Seminars, and Honors Engaged is a year-long civic engagement program led by the Honors First-Year-Experience (FYE) team. Both are designed exclusively for first-year and transfer Honors students to provide a dynamic, interdisciplinary introduction to the life of a scholar-citizen. Our goal is to empower students to take control of their college careers by equipping them with the tools and knowledge they need to succeed and leading them toward rich opportunities for academic, campus, and community engagement. Students will discuss topics and experience events of broad intellectual and practical import as they meet outstanding faculty from across campus and discover the many opportunities and resources available to them at the College of Charleston and beyond. In addition to attending their FYE classes, students will partner with a broad coalition of academic and community leaders to become engaged in the larger Charleston community.
Through a series of reflective exercises and specific writing tasks, students will formulate their ideas and strategies regarding potential majors, career paths, and life goals. This work will culminate in a final portfolio of crucial documents and representative work that students will continue to develop throughout their college careers. Offering students the opportunity to bond as a living-learning community through collaborative assignments, small-group discussion, and meaningful community engagement, BGS and Honors Engaged seek to be a practical and compelling introduction to life in the Honors College and beyond. What does it mean to get Beyond George Street–that avenue running through the center of campus? It means moving from the classroom to independent research; from campus out into the community; from home to the international stage; from where and who you are now, to where and who you want to be next week, next month, next year, and in the decade ahead.
FYE Learning Outcomes
The Honors FYE aspires toward five Learning Outcomes, some shared with the broader campus FYE program and some specific to the Honors College experience:
Learning Objective 1: Engaging and Exploring Campus Resources (BGS/FYE)
- By the completion of the Honors First-Year Experience, students will:
- Understand how to identify and, when appropriate, use relevant academic resources and student support services at the College of Charleston. These would include the Center for Student Learning, the Career Center, the Office of Nationally Competitive Awards, the Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities, The Counseling Center, and other appropriate academic resources, student support services, and cultural resources.
Learning Objective 2: Integrative Learning (BGS/Honors Engaged/FYE)
- By the completion of the first-year, students will:
- Build a portfolio that they will be encouraged to develop across their years at the College. The portfolio provides a venue for integrative learning by students as they draw connections not only between diverse courses, but between their coursework and their extra-curricular and professional endeavors.
- Understand the various elements of the Honors curriculum in concert with the learning / living environment as inspiring and enabling interdisciplinary connections as well as connections to non-academic activities including community engagement, professional development, and extracurricular involvement.
Learning Objective 3: Engaging (Honors Engaged)
- By the end of the Honors First-Year Experience, students will:
- Understand the difference between volunteerism and sustained, informed community outreach.
- Have the opportunity to participate in a sustained community outreach initiative that entails progressive involvement with the Charleston community.
- Be able to analyze service contexts in light of core principles related to asset-based community development.
Learning Objective 4: Equipping (BGS)
- By the end of the Honors First-Year Experience, students will:
- Draft a set of professional documents, including a resume and a Linkedin profile.
- Create a professional, academic, and community engagement action plan that charts out their professional and academic goals over their four years at CofC.
- Understand how to use CofC resources related to professional development such as the Career Center.
Learning Objective 5: Reflective Empowerment (Honors Engaged)
- By the end of the Honors First-Year Experience, students will:
- Be able to reflect more clearly on their core values—both those they currently possess and those they might seek–leading to enhanced purpose-identification.
- Be able to align those core values to the professional, personal, and academic goals they make, leading to increased goal-directedness and overall satisfaction with major life choices.
- Understand the importance of gaining broad cultural proficiency that enables them to approach ideas and issues pertaining to world events, cultural identity, and academic debate from multiple perspectives with an understanding of the full and complex diversity of human experience.