Dr. Bernice Braid, Dean, Academic/Instructional Resources; Director, University Honors, Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus; Chair, NCHC Honors Semesters Committee

Honors Programs everywhere offer enhanced educational experiences, designed to deepen and broaden the insights of students with imagination, energy, and a sense of adventure. The chance to be an active representative of your own Honors Program in one of the many adventures hosted or cosponsored by The National Collegiate Honors Council is an opportunity not to be missed!

Let’s take meetings. Regional meetings are scheduled in the spring, and your university belongs to one of six regional Honors organizations that are NCHC partners. National conferences take place in the fall. Both meeting circuits move around a lot. Attending conferences, whether to pick up ideas for your own Program, participate on a panel, or present a paper or poster, gives you the chance to not only meet students from up to forty-nine other states but also to explore new cities and sites throughout the country.

Some sessions are designed to help small teams of students and faculty map new territories. NCHC calls these adventures City as Text©. They are regular features of meetings structured to introduce methods of exploration that students can pursue both in their own Programs and in many NCHC projects. New Orleans, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Philadelphia—cities large and larger—have offered Honors students and faculty an invitation to hit the streets, eat new food, find out about neighborhood treasures and resources, and talk to local folks to get behind the public rhetoric of each site. In this process, teams begin to discover what REALLY makes these places tick and what it feels like to live, work, and play in each of these cities.

Extended Programs built on such principles of exploration are continuing projects of NCHC, which cosponsors and hosts Semesters and Mini-semesters, opening doors to the world in places such as Greece, the Czech Republic, Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, New York City, Washington, DC, Appalachia, El Paso, Maine, and London. Twenty-seven of these extraordinary invitations-to-discovery have taken place so far and many more are in the works. Each provides a chance to probe a theme—world hunger, local culture, city planning—and/or a way of probing a theme—uncovering, as in being a detective, and testing, as in seeing how “systems” work when embedded in the environments they are meant to protect. Each provides field laboratories in which participants chart a course and figure out how to follow it to interesting conclusions. Each setting presents new challenges—snorkeling off the East Coast or folklore studies conducted while snowed-in among the North Carolina mountains—and reveals secrets as students ask: What are the real boundaries between neighborhoods and cultures?

These are intense and heightened experiences for all who undertake them. Everyone who has been in an NCHC Semester has talked about the challenges, adventures, and triumphs. Above all, they talk about change—change in how they see the world and themselves by the end of the experience. NCHC provides a meta-experience for undergraduates through these projects. Students take all they can from their home setting into this new and foreign one. And then they take a new self and lots of fresh perceptions back into their home setting.

As one student from the 2001 “Reinventing Urban Culture: A National Collegiate Honors Council Honors Semester” at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus, put it:

Nowhere is normal here. No two communities are alike. Chinatown is as different from nearby Greenwich Village as Forest Hills Gardens is from midtown Manhattan. There is no epitome district here. If anything, I’m surprised that I haven’t completely come to expect the unexpected, since that’s what it’s been so much about: the bizarre, the random, the unexpected.

What NCHC promises you is that if you join one of these experiments in exploration, you will not see the world the same again, ever, and it will feel as though you yourself have been reinvented.