Robert Barchi

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Photography: 
Nick Romanenko

This isn’t the Rutgers you grew up with. The new Rutgers is broader in scope, greater in depth, and gives students vastly more opportunities to learn, conduct research, and make exciting discoveries.

Case in point: our commitment to expanding honors education. We are challenging the highest-achieving, most highly motivated students to take full advantage of the academic, cocurricular, and extracurricular resources that only Rutgers provides. We want the world to see all that Rutgers already does—and what a treasure it can be for every student.

In Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick, we are offering honors opportunities that enhance the student experience and build on the strengths of each university. Honors College students at Rutgers University–Camden, which is committed to both civic and campus engagement, volunteer their time and talent to a cause in the community or on campus. Camden honors students are also challenged to take full advantage of their time at Rutgers, enhancing their majors through “experience projects” like study abroad, an interdisciplinary honors thesis, or a dual degree.

Rutgers University–Newark, which also operates a successful Honors College, is exploring a new 500-bed living-learning community. With a curriculum centered on the theme “Local Citizenship in a Global World,” it aims to enroll more students from greater Newark who might not otherwise have access to a residential honors program. The program will identify students with an array of talents and skills, including leadership, innovation, and citizenship, and will collaborate with Newark’s civic and business community to connect students to public scholarship and internship opportunities.

Rutgers University–New Brunswick currently offers honors programs that emphasize research and experiential learning through the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS), the School of Engineering, the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, and the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS), and through SAS at the Rutgers Business School: Undergraduate–New Brunswick. These programs help to recruit and inspire some of New Jersey’s top students.

A new residential Honors College in New Brunswick will operate alongside our school-based honors programs and almost double the number of high-achieving students participating in  honors education in New Brunswick. This fall, we will welcome our first class to the new 500-bed facility on Seminary Place adjacent to Voorhees Mall. The garret-roofed brick building is architecturely in keeping with our historic College Avenue Campus and state-of-the-art in its functionality. First-year students from the participating schools (SAS, SEBS, engineering, phar­macy, business, and Mason Gross School of the Arts) will live and learn together in the Honors College, taking common interdisciplinary courses and “Big Think” seminars on globally significant issues. As they progress toward a degree, honors scholars will work closely with our renowned faculty in completing a capstone project involving original creative and scholarly work in their majors, which will be the central component of their honors experience. We will also help them take advantage of other forms of experiential learning such as study abroad, internships, and public service.

Our goal in establishing honors colleges in Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick is clear: we want to attract students in and outside New Jersey who might otherwise not consider Rutgers by offering an intensive educational experience that connects them to our world-class faculty, to the community, and to the world. Adding this superlative cohort to our student body will allow us to expose them to—and show the broader community—all the outstanding resources that make Rutgers one of the nation’s finest public research universities.