The seven students sitting around a long table in a narrow classroom are absolutely focused as they listen to a guest speaker share her research into surrogate parenthood, turning each of her words over in their minds, digesting the insights she is offering to them.
When she is through, hands shoot up and the questions come flying.
“Is race an issue for surrogates?” one student asks. “Do they ask about the sexual orientation of prospective parents?” asks another. “What is the father’s social role in surrogacy?”
Sociology Professor Gail Kligman also is listening attentively, though her focus is on the students and their emerging insights. She smiles as the exchange seesaws back and forth.
“It isn’t very often you get to talk about these ideas in a small setting,” she says.
But for undergraduates in UCLA’s Honors Programs, such classes as Kligman’s “Theories of Exchange: Social Life of Gifts and Commodities” collegium are valuable forums for stimulating free-flowing interactions.
Some 4,000 undergraduates are enrolled in Honors Programs, which includes the College Honors, Departmental Scholars and individual major programs. Through Honors, students can participate in research projects, find a mentor and get guidance in applying for major national scholarships and fellowships, including the British Marshall and Rhodes scholarships. There are also several College-based scholarships that benefit students in Honors Programs.
The Honors Collegium courses in particular can be life altering for many students.
“I’ve seen a side of life that was new to me,” says Joy Wu, a third-year neuroscience major. “It has made me think about things I’ve never thought about before, like human interaction and cultural differences.”
While her regular classes focus on the substance of her major — biology, chemistry, physics and the like — the Collegium courses she has taken have been expansive. It has been in classes like “Politics and the Rhetoric of Literature” and “Literature and Culture of the American South” that Wu has been able to branch out “and learn about the world.”
For many, the very fact that UCLA offers such a program — with its brew of enriched academics, access to scholarships and internships, highly involved professors and counselors, and an interdisciplinary approach that often marries seemingly disparate subjects — is a key factor in their decision to choose UCLA over other prestigious schools.
“Cal’s package was more flashy, but UCLA had the Honors Collegium,” says Brooke McGowan, a senior comparative literature major who was accepted to Berkeley, UC San Diego and Mills College in the San Francisco Bay area. “It was the deciding factor.
“I was attracted to the idea of a liberal arts college in a large university. I liked the interdisciplinary aspect and the individual attention,” says McGowan, who has twice won UCLA’s Peter Rotter Essay Prize.
The seeds of Honors Programs were sown in the late ’70s when Eugen Weber, then dean of the College of Letters & Science (now known as the UCLA College), and his colleagues developed a lower-division program for gifted first-year and sophomore students that offered interdisciplinary classes with specific honors coursework. By the ’80s, there were about 250 students enrolled in the program, says G. Jennifer Wilson, assistant vice provost for Honors.
Students then, as they are now, were high achievers who usually planned on earning advanced degrees, Wilson says. They were keenly aware of how tough the competition was, and they knew that honors would give them an edge when applying for graduate programs.
The same is true of Honors Programs students today. “They want the best out of their education,” Wilson says. “They want to have as rich an experience as possible.”
The highly competitive program is designed “to nurture the whole student academically, socially, emotionally and intellectually,” according to Honors literature. To qualify, entering freshmen need at least a 1380 SAT or 31 ACT with a 3.9 weighted GPA, or they must be in the top 3 percent of their graduating class. Transfer students need a 3.5 GPA, and continuing UCLA students must have a 3.5 GPA on 12 graded UCLA units, plus the ability to complete the program in an appropriate amount of time.
Students in the program come from diverse ethnic, socioeconomic and academic backgrounds, and that creates “a very exciting intellectual environment,” says Professor of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology Robert B. Goldberg, who teaches an Honors course on genetic engineering in medicine, agriculture and law. “I get very bright kids. I get the chance to try out new courses, new teaching methods, new intellectual directions. It’s a wonderful laboratory with outstanding, bright students. It’s very novel from an educational point of view.”
Although the program is rigorous and there is a high attrition rate in the first year, there is no cap on the number of participants. “We don’t want to be a tiny, elite program,” explains Wilson. “We want all students to think of themselves as excellent students.” About 400 to 450 will graduate each year with College Honors, she says.
The Collegium is the heart of that program. It is a series of interdisciplinary courses, often with no more than 20 students per class. Among the offerings for the Winter Quarter are such courses as “Fantastic Voyage: From Homer to ‘2001’,” “Critical Vision: History of Art as Social and Political Commentary,” “The Structure of Physical Reality” and “Disease and the Human Condition.”
“The Collegium provides a higher bar for those who want the challenge,” says Judith L. Smith, acting executive dean of the UCLA College and vice provost of undergraduate education. “The courses require more work, but students get a lot more out of them.”
UCLA can offer such an intimate, focused experience, Smith says, because of the very fact that it is so large and diverse. “We have the advantage of being able to call upon faculty from a broad range of fields, and students from a broad spectrum of backgrounds, in order to build a smaller community in which people feel comfortable and challenged.”
It works so well, Smith says, because professors “teach courses in their specialty to some of the best undergrads on campus. The small classes encourage critical thinking, writing and interdisciplinary approaches and give faculty opportunities they may not otherwise have.”
Professors often propose classes they would like to teach but can’t within their departments, says Wilson. “For example, ‘Physics of Music’ wouldn’t be taught in either the physics or music departments.”
In addition to learning from scholars who are at the top in their fields worldwide, students might also find themselves being taught by experts from outside the university. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, for example, teaches a Collegium course.
“I used to joke that if I could have majored in Honors Collegium, I would have,” says Vikki Katz ’02, who now is studying for her Ph.D. The Collegium classes she took as an undergraduate, she says, “enriched and gave greater depth to the years I spent at UCLA.”
“The professors in Collegium teach subjects that they truly love. They teach for the joy of it,” Katz says. The enthusiasm of the professors was so infectious “it made me want to go to graduate school and become a teacher myself.”
That feeling of being part of a smaller, more intimate community within the larger whole of the university was “my favorite aspect of Honors Programs,” says Mitra Ebadolahi ’02. “It shrank UCLA into a manageable place.”
While an undergraduate, Ebadolahi spent a month doing field research in Havana for a Departmental Honors thesis on the effects of tourism on developing countries.
“I had such a strong support network that I felt empowered to go out into the UCLA macrocosm and make my mark with confidence,” she says. “I had the best of both worlds: a big school with a plethora of opportunities, and a small school within it where I had the support I needed to make the most of those opportunities.”
A Rhodes Scholar finalist, Ebadolahi currently is on a Fulbright at the London School of Economics.
Having that smaller school-within-a-school feel has been important for many students.
“When I transferred to UCLA from Santa Monica College, I was scared of the size,” says Phillip Carter ’97, now a UCLA law student. A Truman Scholar who served four years in the military after graduating with a degree in political science, Carter says Honors Programs helped him navigate the bureaucracy, pointing him toward scholarships and other opportunities and helping lay out an academic plan. ”I would not have done as well at UCLA had I not had that advantage,” he says.
Even as a freshman, Jonathan Dotan knew he wanted more of a challenge than the typical lower-division courses had to offer. He found it in Honors Programs, where he was able to design his own major in information policy, take graduate-level coursework and find a mentor to set him on an advanced academic path.
Collegium classes “breathe oxygen into topics and allow you to make tremendous relationships with top professors,” he says, adding that the experience is further enhanced by access to classes where he can study cutting-edge issues alongside M.B.A., information science and law students.
Dotan, now a senior, recently was in Bosnia studying criminal justice. This fieldwork, which was funded by an Irving and Jean Stone Honors Research Stipend and a UCLA Ricardi Research Fellowship, “has really put me ahead in terms of life experience and career options,” he notes.
While there are several student-research programs carrying honors credit that are open to all undergrads, College Honors students can also get honors credits for enriched experiences, such as work on the Catalina Island Marine Biology project or internship and study at the Center for American Politics and Public Policy in Washington, D.C.
The Collegium is not all about advanced studies, however. Courses in the program often will satisfy general education and breadth requirements. Carter, for instance, found that as a non-science major he would not have been able to take a class on radiation oncology. But through the Collegium he was able to take such a course, geared toward the lower division, that satisfied a science requirement.
The interdisciplinary approach also attracts students from a broad academic spectrum. For instance, Kligman’s mostly third- and fifth-year students are majoring in life sciences, art history, Spanish, communication strategies, history and political science.
For many students, the program is an impetus to work to their full potential, even at times when they might prefer to cut back.
“The program keeps me on top of things,” says Adriana Palomares, an English literature major. “Knowing that my Honors classes require more of my time keeps me from procrastinating.” And being around other high-achieving students is a great motivator. “I do not want to be the only one behind in class discussions,” she says.
If it seems that students rave about the classes, they practically gush about the faculty.
And the professors gush right back.
“What could be better than bright, inquisitive students taking a course that I have dreamed up because it suits me perfectly?” asks Professor of English Janet Hadda, a recipient of the Harriet and Charles Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award, who leads a Collegium course on psychology and literature.
Professor of English Robert N. Watson, who teaches classes on popular culture, notes that the Collegium allows professors to “propose and teach courses that departments generally can’t make room for, including teaching outside one’s area of specialization to pursue a new or side interest.”
Best of all, he says, “One can assume that the students will be smart, eager and prepared. It’s a chance to make a real contribution to the interdisciplinary functions of the campus.”
Professor of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics Jeffrey H. Miller teaches a Collegium course about the interaction of science and society. “We deal with a lot of controversial topics” and discussions can sometimes get tense, he says, but that only makes it more intellectually stimulating. With at least 60 applicants for the 20 class seats, he looks forward to a class mix that reflects varied viewpoints.
“I learn more than the students do each time,” he says. “It’s a terrific experience.”
While some students might complain that it is at times difficult, because of the limited number of courses, to get the class one wants or needs, or that perhaps a selection of the science offerings are more “pop” than hard science, most have found that being in Honors Programs has been a defining educational experience.
“Honors provided me with a sense of academic direction,” says Katz. “It has reinforced the deliciousness of dabbling in other disciplines for the pure enjoyment of learning.”
