Mission, Vision & Values
University of Maryland Honors College
The Premier Honors College of the Nation’s Capital Area
The University of Maryland Honors College gives diverse students of great academic promise the opportunity to explore new ideas and experiences, to learn through inclusive community and with a deep respect for others, and to pursue the power of knowledge to make a difference in the world.
Our Vision
We prepare tomorrow’s leaders and thinkers, artists and scientists, builders and change-makers, to meet thoughtfully and humanely the important questions and grand challenges of our time.
Our Mission
Our mission is to inspire and empower highly motivated students from across the world to explore the limits of their curiosity and unleash their full potential. We offer a dynamic and supportive environment for students to discover themselves, engage in diverse interchange, and advance to extraordinary success in whatever callings of life they choose. We prepare these future leaders in thought and action to marshal the power of knowledge to make transformative and meaningful differences in the world, and to do so in a spirit of generosity and interconnected humanity.
At the University of Maryland, our Honors College offers a unique array of cutting-edge programs that work across fields to address major issues and grand challenges of our time. These programs reimagine Honors education through their commitments to big picture questions and multidisciplinary thinking, cutting-edge tools and techniques of understanding and impact, inclusive and global perspectives, and innovative and collaborative approaches to problem-solving. We believe in students and distinguished faculty engaging in discovery together, and we emphasize active learning experiences where students create new possibilities of understanding and insight, foster leadership skills and initiative, engage in original research, internships, and public service projects, and open up other advanced pathways of discovery, creativity, and impact. Importantly, our close-knit and highly attentive programs make directly available to our students the vast resources and expertise of our entire leading public research university, as well as the special and extensive opportunities of our global national capital area and all the governmental, industry, non-profit, and public interest partners and experts in it to which we are directly connected.
Our philosophy of education begins with community. Maryland Honors students live and take classes together in close-knit communities where they form important relationships with peers, faculty, staff, alumni, and mentors that last a lifetime. These supportive and inclusive communities encourage students of diverse backgrounds but with shared interests to explore their curiosities and passions, take creative risks, embrace new ideas, and collaborate with others. We deeply believe in the power of small communities to open doors of imagination, to offer a welcoming and stimulating environment of inclusive belonging and intellectual challenge, and to provide the guidance, support, and camaraderie so fundamental to making the most of one’s undergraduate experience, and setting up a lifetime of contribution and thoughtfulness to follow.
Our Values
Across our programs, Maryland Honors holds four core values:
Intellectual curiosity, creative discovery, and critical thinking. We value knowledge, creativity, discovery, critical thinking, and endless curiosity—all pursued boldly and without boundaries. We believe that a wide-ranging motivation to learn opens doors to and establishes deep and wide foundations for future success, understanding, and action in our highly interconnected world.
Diverse and inclusive communities. We value diversity in all forms as a baseline condition of learning, growth, cooperation, accountability, and meaningful and just interactions. We believe that inclusive communities—grounded in values of deep respect, authentic belonging, attentiveness and generosity in engaging others in all their differences and dignity—are fundamental to the worlds we seek to create both inside and outside the Honors College.
Innovative problem-solving. We value the application of new tools, discoveries, methods, and means of understanding to provide innovative and inclusive solutions and approaches to problems and questions facing humanity.
Thoughtful and engaged leadership. We value leadership and public engagement in all areas of life that are comprised of informed decision-making, multidisciplinary understanding, and thoughtful care and concern with respect to all those affected.
Some characteristics of Maryland Honors students:
- passionate learners: committed to a broad and deep pursuit of knowledge
- creative and imaginative risk-takers: willing to experiment with new fields and experience, willing to confront the unknown and to think and engage across boundaries of all kinds
- thoughtful leaders: discovering and pursuing their passions and interests, in collaboration with others, in ambitious, purposeful, socially meaningful and impactful ways
- innovative problem-solvers and critical thinkers: embracing different critical paradigms, across the humanities and sciences, for thinking carefully, connectively, and factually about the world, and exploring the most recent tools and techniques of problem-solving and research discovery
- independent and ethical thinkers and makers: thinking for oneself, thinking about others, creating for and with others
- showing courage and determination, persistence and resilience, when faced with difficult ideas or difficult experiences
- demonstrating intellectual curiosity and thoughtful attentiveness both inside and outside the classroom
- self-conscious reflection on values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as a condition of learning and foundation for just human interactions
- an expansive sense of citizenship: predicated on responsibility, maturity, and empathetic and invested relationship with others, taking responsibility for one’s own actions
Summary
Maryland Honors is the premier Honors College of the nation’s capital area, and one of the leading Honors Colleges in the world, uniquely combining:
- a nationally distinguished array of cutting-edge multidisciplinary programs, drawing on distinguished faculty and vast resources across our major public research university;
- special and wide-ranging global, professional, research, internship, mentorship, learning and other opportunities uniquely accessible for our students through our direct embeddedness in the nation’s capital area;
- a living-learning philosophy in which diverse students interested in similar areas of inquiry live and learn together in close contact with distinguished faculty and staff, effectively bringing the intimacy and attentiveness of small college to a campus of extensive size and resource; and,
- a mission of fostering intellectual curiosity and inclusive excellence to help launch and empower students on the college journey of self-discovery and preparation for the full potential of their fulfillment and role as leaders in thought, action, and difference-making in the world.
Through these aspects, we empower our students. We incubate and facilitate the enormous differences they can make in the world by themselves and in collaboration with others.