Welcome to the University of Georgia’s Honors Program. In these pages, you will see that we provide not only an Honors education through smaller courses taught by UGA’s finest professors, but we also offer a wide range of opportunities for learning and growth that extend far beyond the classroom.

These extracurricular opportunities include a variety of programs that connect great students with great faculty, such as our Book Discussions, held in faculty members’ homes, and our Lunchbox Lectures, in which Honors students can learn about the latest work being done by faculty members. The Honors Program’s Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities (better known as CURO) makes it possible for Honors students to conduct frontline research alongside faculty mentors.

UGA Honors students regularly go not only beyond the classroom, but also beyond campus. Every summer, our Honors Internships in Washington, DC, New York City, and Savannah, Georgia, place students in epicenters such as congressional offices, the studios of Voice of America, the halls of the Greater New York Hospital Association, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Southern Georgia, and many more. The Honors International Scholars Program provides support for students to study, work, and serve abroad, with no area of the world off limits. Honors International Scholars have received support to travel to all seven continents.

With all of the programming opportunities we provide, it is no surprise that our students are competitive with the very best students in the nation for coveted slots in highly selective graduate and professional schools, as well as exciting careers. Clear evidence of this is the great success our students have enjoyed in the past decade in external major scholarship competitions such as the Rhodes, Marshall, Mitchell, Gates Cambridge, Truman, Goldwater, Udall, Fulbright, and Merage fellowships. Over the past decade, UGA Honors students have won more than 50 such awards. In 2003, UGA was joined only by Brown, Harvard, and Yale in having recipients of the Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, and Goldwater scholarships that year. In 2008, only Columbia, Stanford, Yale, and UGA had recipients of the Rhodes, Truman, Goldwater, and Udall scholarships. That same year, UGA was the only public institution in the country with more than one Rhodes Scholar, with two.

Whatever our overall success, the UGA Honors Program is not just all the opportunities we provide. These are in service to an overarching goal. At heart, we seek to inspire students not only to meet but exceed their academic dreams, and to provide them the means to do so. We offer the best of two worlds—the personal approach of the finest small liberal arts colleges together with the great social and academic benefits of a major research university set in the quintessential college town of Athens, Georgia.

The UGA Honors Program is an exciting place to be, and I hope you will find it an exciting place to visit, through our site. Thank you for your interest.

David S. Williams, Ph.D.
Director of the Honors Program and
Meigs Professor of Religion

curriculum vitae