FCLC Honors Program

What is distinctive about the FCLC Honors Program? It takes seriously the motto, “New York is my campus, Fordham is my school.” Many of the Honors seminars have New York City as their focus or use institutions in the city as their classrooms. Where better to study art history than at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the history of New York than at the New-York Historical Society? Our location in the middle of Manhattan, one block from Central Park, puts students within walking distance of most of the city’s great cultural institutions, and a short subway ride away from many of its neighborhoods. Honors students develop over four years into citizens of New York City through a variety of community engaged learning experiences.

In their first year, Honors students take most of their classes together in seminars designed especially for them by some of the college’s best faculty members. A rigorous, accelerated liberal arts and sciences core curriculum allows most Honors students, after the first year, to pursue a double major or an interdisciplinary major like Integrative Neuroscience or International Studies plus a minor. All Honors students are required to attain proficiency in a language other than English. The structure of the program encourages spending a semester or even both semesters of junior year studying abroad. Students who stay at Fordham for their junior year pursue an internship, community service project or mentored research. Read about some of these study abroad and community engaged learning experiences on our blog.

In the senior year, Honors students pursue independent research toward a thesis or creative project, working together in a thesis workshop in the fall. In their final semester, they take a capstone values seminar together while continuing to hone their senior research projects, which they present publicly at the end of the semester. Some of them even publish their research in the Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal (FURJ) or the present it at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) or the Undergraduate Awards Global Summit (UAGS).