The College Honors program at Salem College offers academically talented students a community that pushes conventional scholarly boundaries in an effort to promote excellence.  When you are an Honors Scholars, you will interact with peers, prominent scholars, writers, business people and community leaders to advance your critical thinking skills and your knowledge of the increasingly diverse world in which we live.

At the conclusion of each semester, the director of the College Honors program invites newly qualified students to take a place in the program.  This flexibility enables you to begin the College Honors program as an incoming first-year student or as a rising sophomore and junior. 

Your Program

The power of the College Honors program is centered in its diversity of courses and students' majors.  A biology major is likely to find herself sitting in an honors interdisciplinary seminar on the films of Alfred Hitchcock with history, English, math and religion majors, while a religion major might sit beside science and math majors in an environmental chemistry seminar. 

The following are some of the more recent offerings from the College Honors program:

Images of Women in French Literature and Film 
Black Women Writers of the 19th Century: "The Women's Era" 
Myth, Music and Cultural Values 
The History of Emotion 
The Films of Alfred Hitchcock 
The Art, Music and Literature of the Harlem Renaissance 
Hiroshima: The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb 
Environmental Chemistry 
Women at War: Allied and Axis, 1939-1945 
Baroque Art, Music and Literature: The Age of Extravagance

Your Faculty

Teaching College Honors courses brings great joy and intellectual fulfillment to the faculty who work in the program.  These courses enable faculty to teach in areas in which their interest is greatest.  In the College Honors Program, you will find a professor of modern languages teaching a course on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, an English professor teaching a seminar about the affects Darwin's theory of evolution had on Victorian writers and a music professor leading students to investigate how myth, poetry and music reflect the values of a specific era. 

Your Experience

As a student selected to participate in the College Honors program, you will join a unique group of young scholars who share your desire not only to succeed but also to excel.  The College Honors curriculum is comprised of an every-changing group of eclectic but rigorous classes developed to challenge, motivate and excite students who desire to explore and understand the kinds of knowledge assumed to be necessary for educated reading, thinking and learning to take place. 

The culmination of the College Honors program is the annual Academic Excellence Day, which takes place in the spring. As a graduating Honors Scholar, you will present the results of your honors thesis to the Salem community, friends and family.  This formal event is an exciting way to highlight the scholarly investigations that you have undertaken during your time in the program. 

Your Results

As a participant in the College Honors program, you will graduate from Salem with that designation, joining other honor graduates who have gone on to be some of Salem's most successful alumnae.  Several have attended law school, some are in graduate or medical schools and others are working in the public or private sector.  Graduation with College Honors sets you apart from others who compete for the same programs or positions.  Graduate admission committees and potential employers understand that a student who completes the College Honors program has been willing and able to take on some of the most rigorous courses Salem College offers.  Such a distinction underscores your student's work ethic, your tenacity and your desire to learn.