Honors classes will stretch you beyond the courses in your major; you'll find yourself engaging in debates about the French Revolution, Marxist versions of fairytales, ancient Greek democracy and Medical Ethics. You'll start with the two first-year Honors courses (which fulfill the general education requirement for three composition and literature courses) before moving on to Honors Philosophy in your sophomore year. Honors Ethics is offered every spring, and each semester there's a new topic for Honors Colloquium, ranging from the Iowa Landscapes photography course to Homer's The Odyssey, North Iowa History, Women's Suffrage, or Restoring and Restorying the Prairie. You could travel to Europe with other Honors students and have that count toward your graduation credits. And, as a Junior or Senior, your Honors capstone experience will be the chance to spend a semester, or a whole year, working with a professor of your choice on an Honors Thesis. In recent years, students have written a lab project about Emery-Dreifuss Muscular Dystrophy symptoms, compared journalists' reports on the 1964 murder case of Kitty Genovese, developed a long story set in 1700s Scotland, and completed a thesis entitled "How to Write, Direct, and Star in your Own Play … and Survive!"

Since some of the Honors credits overlap with general education requirements, the Honors curriculum adds only about 10-11 credits spread over your time at Waldorf. Students are welcome to talk with the Honors Director about waiving some requirements that they fulfilled before joining our program. Honors students who are making good progress toward completing the required Honors courses with a final course grade of a B or above and are maintaining a GPA of 3.5 or above are eligible to travel on the Honors World Trip, and those who complete all of the requirements will earn the title of Waldorf Scholar and be honored with a medal at Commencement.