John V. Roach Honors College Q&A

Dean Einstein and Dr. Ron Pitcock, Interim Dean of the John V. Roach Honors College answered questions about the honors college in a live chat. Watch the entire video or check out tips to decide whether TCU's honors college is the right fit for you.

 

 
The honors college application is due after the TCU application
Once you submit your application to TCU, you can find the honors application in your portal. There are two extra essays you'll need to complete to apply for honors and the first deadline is November 15. The first essay prompt asks what area of study you'd like to explore that's personally meaningful. You have a few options for the second essay, including a fun prompt to write a note to a future friend in Milton Daniel Hall, which is a residential community for honors students.

No matter what decision round you apply for, you'll receive a decision about your honors college application about 4-6 weeks after your offer of admission. For a sense of the size of the program, about 10 percent of students in the current first-year class are part of the honors college.

Honors students make more than good grades
We look for highly motivated students who have a genuine love of learning. Are you the kind of person who gets lost in a rabbit hole doing an assignment? If you want to learn everything you can and get involved with everything you can, TCU's honors college is for you.

At TCU, we want honors students to be engaged in organizations and leadership roles throughout the entire campus. Around 80 percent of honors students study abroad. And they're highly involved on campus in the Student Government Association, Marching Band, Greek Life, Athletics and more.

The Milton Daniel community is key
Honors students stay in the Milton Daniel residence hall their first year on campus, engaging in a supportive community of learning and connection. The residence hall is central to campus and houses around 200 first-year honors students each year, as well as upperclassmen who serve as mentors. A study surveying alumni from the past 10 years revealed that the two most important factors in the honors experience are mentorship and lifelong connections made in the Milton Daniel community.

Honors classes emphasize quality, not quantity
Honors classes aren't designed around extra work or difficulty. They are focused on a higher quality of engagement and mentorship. Students take classes like Cultural Memory and Beyoncé and Intersectionality. This fall in the Video Games and Representation course, students are studying representation of indigenous people in video games and designing an exhibit for the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas. In a class called Giving and Philanthropy, students have $100,000 in real money to give to five charitable organizations and they debate which organizations should receive the gifts, often taking hours to reach a decision because they're so passionate about these organizations they've learned about through the semester.