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.
• Push the boundaries of knowledge and engage with new and challenging ideas to drive innovation. 
• Engage in constructive feedback or critique with peers and faculty, enabling you to iterate and improve both current projects and future work.
• Be a strong partner in your education, asking critical, informed, and well-considered questions that will clarify and foster our collective inquiry and innovation. 
• Value our diversity, our rich differences in disciplinary training, scholarly experiences, and approaches to teaching. 

Multiple instructors and sections 
Squires 134

Intro to Virginia Tech Honors is the required course for all new Honors College students. Students must complete this course with a passing grade by the end of their first year in Honors. The one (1) honors credit for this course counts in the Collaborative Discovery category of the Honors Laureate Diploma.

CRN 22525
Dr. Michael Kretser

This course develops students’ ability to understand and address global problems through systems thinking, critical thinking, in a transdisciplinary, collaborative setting. Differences between disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity are explored. Qualitative and quantitative research methods are introduced with "Wicked problems," problem analysis, iterative thinking, and the principles of collaborative discovery. Ethical dimensions of trans-sector activity are also explored.  

This course is primarily for students pursuing the HCES diploma. If you are a non-HCES student interested in participating in this course, please reach out to Dr. Budowle to express interest based on availability. 

CRN 21871
Dr. Rachael Budowle

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. 

CRN 21019 - Dr. Nikki Lewis

Are you interested in engaging in research as an undergraduate, either independently or as part of a faculty-led project? Do you think you might be interested in a job as a researcher or in going to grad school?  The Introduction to Honors Quantitative and Qualitative Research Practices (UH 1604) course offers practice with introductory skills for quantitative and qualitative research including generating focused research questions, finding and critically evaluating scholarly literature, composing evidence-based arguments, understanding ethical considerations for research, collaborative research practices, and presenting to a general academic audience. UH 1604 provides the tools you need for undergraduate research and internships and provides a starting point for conversations that connect you with faculty and peers for future research opportunities.

CRN 21038
Kevin Jones

Impact doesn't happen by accident. It's designed. This Honors studio-lab treats design as a way of working, open to students from every major. It sits where sports, community, culture, technology, and social systems meet. You'll work in transdisciplinary teams on "wicked problems”, real challenges with social and ethical stakes and no simple answer. Through prototyping, testing, critique, and reflection, you'll make physical and digital artifacts. Along the way, you'll learn to recognize and explain the embodied intelligence behind your decisions: the judgment that comes from lived experience, ethics, empathy, and performing under pressure.

The course runs in four phases: Orientation & Framing, Making & Extraction, Collaboration & Systems Thinking, and Integration & Exhibition. It values process over polish, systems over objects, and responsibility over spectacle. You don't need design experience, and you won't be trained to become a designer. Instead, you'll build shared frameworks and collaborative habits for working inside complexity, across differences, and in service of communities. The work moves from insight + action = impact and ends in a public exhibition.

CRN 21040
Dr. Anne Patrick

In this course, students will examine the definition of peace outlined by the Nobel Peace Prize, analyze cultural understandings of these tenets, and analyze how these tenets are present in local scenarios that require peace and reconciliation. Students will explore their own definition of peace and how that is represented by a broader global community. Students will apply these definitions of peace to their day-to-day experiences and work to understand how peace can be understood to benefit the human condition. 

CRN 21693
Dr. Jeremy Wojdak

Many of our most critical health challenges, such as pandemics, antimicrobial resistance, and food system disruptions, arise from deeply interconnected systems linking humans, animals, and the environment. Through exploration and discussion, students will practice integrating their own perspectives from public health, economics, veterinary medicine, public policy, biology, data science, engineering, sociology and more to better recognize these connections in health systems.  Students will collaboratively build systems-level understanding of how evidence, behavior, and institutional decision-making shape health outcomes through case studies and simulations. Students may examine, for example, antimicrobial resistance in a regional health system, exploring how prescribing practices, agricultural antibiotic use, and patient behavior influence long-term public health risk. 

CRN 21047 - Dr. Michael Kretser
CRN 21044 - Kevin Jones

Inc.Ub8 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 information about SuperStudio is below.

CRN 21049
Dr. Nikki Lewis

The second course provides time for depth in understanding and practice of teamwork, collaboration, synthesis, and communication skills. Discussions of topics like ethics and civic engagement will inform the work you do on a semester-long project. By the end of the semester, you will work with a variety of students from multiple majors, analyze climate and community-related topics through discussion and critical reflection, and propose a solution to a complex problem with supporting materials.