Honors Credit Opportunities

The Virginia Tech Honors College offers you exceptional learning opportunities, extraordinary courses, and experiences that are not available to students outside the college and its partnerships. These opportunities are quite challenging and require that you stretch yourself beyond what is asked of you in high school and many other university settings. As a VT Honors College student, you should be aware of the following Honors College (UH) Course expectations.

We expect the best from ourselves and our colleagues – and that includes you, our students. We invest heavily in and have high standards for our individual and collective work, and we expect you will do the same.

These standards mean you should expect to –

• Participate as a highly motivated, independent, and reflective learner, who builds collaborative and transdisciplinary skills. You will need to make connections and apply yourself across disparate domains of knowledge and action. This process requires you to play an active role in your learning, work respectfully across disciplines and sectors, and seek connections within and between courses.
• Push the boundaries of knowledge and engage with new and challenging ideas to drive innovation. This is difficult work and requires more effort than you might initially think. Indeed, it is often more challenging than you may encounter in your major. Full engagement means failure is inevitable at times, as is learning from failure for growth and improvement over time.
• Engage in constructive feedback or critique with peers and faculty, enabling you to iterate and improve both current projects and future work. We care deeply about you, your ideas, and your work, and we engage accordingly. We express this care and respect through feedback and critique designed to push you beyond your current limitations and encourage improvement through iteration. No matter how strong your work is, continually ask yourself, “What have I not yet considered? How could I improve this?”. Unlike some of your past experiences with feedback, Honors courses often require you to apply feedback to a new version of the same project so that you can improve it over time.
• Be a strong partner in your education, asking critical, informed, and well-considered questions that will clarify and foster our collective inquiry and innovation. Asking questions about course structures you may not understand, expectations for your performance, and interpretation of feedback is key to success.
• Value our diversity, our rich differences in disciplinary training, scholarly experiences, and approaches to teaching. As our partners in this transdisciplinary effort, you will need to embrace this diversity as well, moving beyond a desire for single perspectives and simple answers.

92045
Dr. Budowle
T 3:30 - 6:20
Hillcrest 143

This course introduces students to service-learning and community engagement. Students will explore foundational concepts and local community and greater social contexts to prepare them for the Honors Community Engagement & Service (HCES) diploma.  HCES is a new, limited opportunity launching in fall 2026 for students who are deeply committed to Virginia Tech’s Ut Prosim motto and engaging with community priorities and needs, culminating in real-world, professional community projects.  Alongside community experiences and field trips, students will engage with group processes, individual reflection, key readings and discussions, and classroom activities to help inform personal action plans for community engagement.
This course is for entering first-year/transfer students and sophomores pursuing or who have an interest in the HCES diploma.

90844
Dr. Lewis
TR 3:30PM - 4:45PM (in person on Tuesdays; asynchronous online Thursday)
SQUIR 134

OR 

90845     
Dr. Wojdak
TR 3:30PM - 4:45PM (in person on Thursdays; asynchronous online Tuesdays)
SQUIR 134

Understanding what research is and how to identify it opens the door for making connections between different fields. Emerging areas of research often fit at the intersection of multiple fields and require understanding of practices in more than one discipline. In this course, you will survey critical practices in quantitative and qualitative research designed to tackle complex problems, including approaches to identifying stakeholders for a research study, collaborating across disciplines, proposing approaches to address informed research questions, managing research teams, and using posters to present proposed research studies. This is the second in the four-course research practices series.

Dr. Lewis and Prof. Henshaw
MW 2:30 - 3:45
SQUIR 134

90847

Explore the fast-evolving world of human-AI collaboration, where technology can be both a powerful partner and unpredictable adversary in academic and professional work. In this course you’ll investigate scenarios across disciplines to uncover how we can use AI ethically, creatively, and responsibly without losing our integrity or innovative edge.

90848
Dr. Velez
MW 9:30-10:45
SQUIR 134

Humans interact with their environments in many ways. We are both shaped by and work to shape the physical and social environments with which we interact. In this course, we will consider historic and contemporary interactions between humans and their environments as we seek to better understand the physical environment as comprised of built, open, and natural elements and recognize social and cultural environments. We will consider social and technical innovations that have moderated interactions between humans and their environments, consider ethical implications of innovations, and recognize and respect disciplinary differences and transdisciplinary value in approaches to understanding human-environment interactions.

92120
Dr. Patrick
TR 11:00 - 12:15
SQUIR 134

Slow violence is a concept originally coined to describe the delayed, invisible harm of environmental destruction. Often not viewed as violence, slow violence addresses the consequences of environmental devastation where the perpetrator may not be directly traceable, but the impact on the victims is clear. In this class, students will explore the cultural definitions of violence, the limitations of those definitions, and examine the necessity of recognizing the impact of slow violence. In addition to this understanding, students will work to apply the framework of slow violence to larger wicked problems experienced throughout our world. Utilizing the disciplines of students in attendance, the class will explore the broader consequences of slow violence across our physical and social world.  

90852
Dr. Kretser

OR

92183
Prof. Jones
Thursdays, 5:00 - 7:30
SQUIR 134

Please note: 90852 and 92183 are NOT part of SuperStudio.

INCUB8 LAB is a two-semester build cycle for students who want to enter complexity and reshape it. The studio is designed for those committed to tackling consequential problems, generating original solutions, testing them through business logic, building viable prototypes, and pitching with clarity to those who can fund and scale the work.  Students will work in deliberately constructed teams of three to four across disciplines, architects with engineers, policy thinkers with designers, data alongside narrative for transdisciplinary execution. The goal is to think across boundaries, distribute intelligence, and build what none of you could create alone.

The 2026–27 cycle anchors itself in the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals as strategic constraints.  Strong concepts will be advanced toward entrepreneurial platforms such as the Hult Prize and similar competitions. If you already have a venture, this studio becomes your acceleration environment.

This studio is about ideas under pressure tested, structured, and built to move beyond the classroom.  Fall is disciplined discovery: systems mapping, early prototyping, team structure, and rigorous concept formation. Spring is proof: functional prototypes, market validation, investment narratives, and growth strategy.

More info about SuperStudio is below.

90857
W 11:15-12:05

In this course, you will further develop the teamwork, collaboration, synthesis, and communication skills that will help you land a job.  By the end of the semester, you will work with a variety of students from multiple majors, analyze climate and community-related topics through critical reflection, and create a project for your portfolio or resume.