Honors courses have been the best part of my academic experience at Penn State thus far. I’m a rising sophomore, so I was recently in your place as an incoming freshman. I was initially nervous about the concept of taking honors classes in college, where they were no longer weighted in my GPA like they often were in high school. However, just because these classes were considered honors did not necessarily make them harder (I actually think these were my easiest classes here). This is because I had the opportunity to get to know my professors on a personal basis, since these classes were much smaller than my lecture-style General Education courses. I also got to know the other students in the class very well due to the smaller size, which made studying for tests or working on group projects much easier to communicate with one another to achieve. I also found my closer relationships with these professors made it much easier for me to feel comfortable asking them questions whenever I was confused with an assignment or may have needed extra help with a certain concept.
I have honestly enjoyed all of my honors courses here so far; however, my favorite was Comm150H I just took in spring semester. I am a double major in education and English, so the course didn’t directly pertain to my major (yet it was my most enjoyable so far). This course was about cinema art and films. The class was set up in a way that on Tuesdays we met in the State Theater downtown (which was super cool to have class in a local movie theater) with the entire Comm150 course (not just honors students), and we listened to a lecture about the current topic and then watched a movie that dealt with the topic (getting to watch movies for class every week was basically the greatest thing ever). Then on Thursdays, the smaller honors class of about 12 people met in a room on campus to have a discussion of the concept for the week and often watch clips from other films that further demonstrated the ideas we were learning. I got to meet people outside of Schreyer and still have the opportunity to benefit from the smaller class size each week, which made Comm150H my favorite honors course at Penn State so far!