Honors Program

The Honors Program at Salem College offers academically talented students a community that pushes conventional scholarly boundaries to promote excellence. Honors Scholars interact with peers, prominent scholars, writers, business professionals, and community leaders to advance their critical thinking skills and their knowledge of the increasingly diverse world in which we live.

Honors Scholars who have graduated with College Honors have gone on to be some of Salem’s most successful alumnae as the program provides a competitive edge when applying for top graduate programs, medical school, and employment in the public or private sector. 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 the student’s work ethic, their tenacity, and desire to learn and succeed.

The core of the College Honors experience is its curriculum, an ever-changing range of courses that challenge, motivate, and excite students to learn deeply.  Those courses are coupled with independent research experiences with faculty, and with regular gatherings that unite honors students and honors faculty in conversation and activity. The culmination of the College Honors Program is an Honors Symposium held each year during the Celebration of Academic Excellence (CAE). Graduating Honors Scholars present the results of their honors theses to the Salem community, friends, and family. This formal event is an exciting way to highlight the scholarly investigations that Honors Scholars have undertaken during their time in the program.

• Honors students regularly take classes that have a health leadership focus and do health-related research projects. For instance in an honors seminar on:
  • “Mental Health Promotion” they study leadership in Public Health contexts
  • “Plague Through the Pages,” they explore portrayal of illness in literature across ages and how it influenced the treatment and belief systems around health and medicine.
• Working closely with the faculty in honors independent studies, students can pursue current topics directly related to health leadership such as the impact of nutrition on female athletes, the influence of dietary minerals on global mental health, or the progression of tuberculosis in vulnerable populations.