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.

20573
Prof. Henshaw
Tuesday/Thursday, 5:00 – 6:15
WHIT 300

Class meets in person on Tuesdays; group assignments during Thursday class time. Do NOT enroll in another course or schedule any commitments or meetings during our Tuesday class time (5:00 - 6:15)

OR

20574
Dr. Patrick
Monday/Wednesday, 4:00 – 5:15

WHIT 300

Class meets in person on Wednesdays; group assignments during Monday class time. Do NOT enroll in another course or schedule any commitments or meetings during our Monday class time (4:00 - 5:15).

Introduction to honors education at Virginia Tech. Disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. Qualitative and quantitative research methods. "Wicked problems," systems thinking, and collaborative discovery. Problem analysis and iterative thinking. Ethical dimensions of trans-sector activity.

20576
Dr. Velez
Tuesday/Thursday, 3:30 – 4:45
Squires 134

OR

20577
Dr. Lewis
Tuesday/Thursday, 3:30 – 4:45
Squires 134

Are you interested in engaging in research as an undergraduate, either independently or as part of a faculty project? Do you think you might be interested in a job as a researcher or in going to grad school?  Take UH 1604 to learn about critical practices in undergraduate quantitative and qualitative research including generating focused research questions, finding scholarly literature, organizing data, conducting ethical research, collaborative research practices, and identifying venues to present research findings. UH 1604 Research Practices focuses on critical practices in undergraduate quantitative and qualitative research, providing an introduction to best practices for application or as an entry-point to the series of research courses. Learn about other Honors students who have engaged in undergraduate research, and start making connections with faculty and peers that might lead to research opportunities in the future!

20869

Dr. Kretser
Tuesdays/Thursdays, 12:30 - 1:45
Squires 134
 
This course explores design, evaluation, and improvement of supply chains from a sustainability perspective. The goal of improving supply chains comes from the Triple Bottom Line approach (People, Planet, Profit) and this course is anchored on understanding a circular economy as envisioned in the Cradle-to-Cradle movement. Students from all backgrounds will analyze environmental, social, and economic concerns in supply chains provided by the instructor and from their own research. Topics include ethical workforce conditions, environmental impacts, and global supply transportation that contributes, positively or negatively, to the Triple Bottom Line. We discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly side of trying to build sustainable networks that bring products and services from suppliers to customers. Application of knowledge and processes from other disciplines is expected.

22330 

Dr. Patrick
Monday/Wednesday, 9:30 – 10:45
Hillcrest 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.  

22331

Prof. Jones
T/R 3:30 – 4:45
Hillcrest 143

In this seminar, students will explore creativity as a transdisciplinary practice that connects art, design, science, and everyday life. Through a form of creative expression they are personally active in, such as writing, design, music, visual art, dance, or another craft, students will develop mindsets and methods that expand their creative potential.  Alongside hands-on work, students will study contemporary research on creativity and investigate how creative processes operate within their majors and future professions. The course encourages students to view creativity as both an individual and collective intelligence, one that bridges disciplines, cultivates understanding, and transforms ideas into impact.  By the end of the course, students will produce a reflective project that demonstrates their creative growth and articulates how collaboration and innovation intersect across fields.

20610

Prof. Jones
Tuesday/Thursday, 2:00 – 3:15
Hillcrest 143

This course is NOT part of SuperStudio.

This studio course flips the script on how we see design, sports, and community. This course brings together a crew of thinkers, creators, and disruptors from all disciplines to explore how sports can be a vehicle for real social change. You’ll learn how to collaborate, prototype, and build solutions that take on real-world challenges, using the game to fuel impact.  It’s not just about design. It’s about team. It’s about culture. It’s about the moves you make to change the game in your community. In this course, you’ll get to dive deep into what it means to create with purpose and build a team that can shake things up.  By the end, you’ll have a project that redefines what it means to fuse sports, design, and culture, building solutions that don’t just sit on paper but shift the community and change the narrative.  

20605

Dr. Ruiz-Geli
Thursdays, 5:00 – 7:50
Squires 134

Students in this course will interact with the staff and collection of The Watermill Center on Long Island, New York, which was founded in 1992 by artist and theater director Robert Wilson to be space where artists-in-residence from the fields of Art, Dance, Theater, Architecture, Landscape Studies, Furniture Design, Lighting Design, and History can engage in unique transdisciplinary collaborations.  Students will navigate the collection with Chief Curator Noah Khoshbin, using mapping, drawing, photography, and other creative practices to research origins, uncover cultural roots, create protocols and timelines, and discover the meanings of the collection’s ancestral and modern craftsmanship.

More information about SuperStudio is below.

20611

Dr. Velez
Wednesdays, 11:15 – 12:05
Squires 134

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.

To be announced.

ENGL 3734H - Community Writing - 15233
HNFE 2014H - Nutrition Across the Life Span - 16502
ISC 1106H - Integrated Science I - 16797
ISC 1106H - Integrated Science I - 16797
ISC 2106H - Integrated Science II - 16800

MATH 2114H - Introduction to Linear Algebra - 17378
MATH 2204H - Introduction to Multivariable - 21771
MATH 2214H - Introduction to Differential E - 21772
MATH 2406H - Mathematics in a Computational - 17436
MATH 2406H - Mathematics in a Computational - 17436
MKTG 3104H - Marketing Management - 18204
MUS 3164H - History of Electronic Music - 18481