Research
The name says it: the great glory of major research universities is their facility for research. Honors education should share this to the fullest extent with gifted college students. That is why Honors at Iowa created the Iowa Center for Research by Undergraduates, which matches students with money and mentors for frontier inquiries of all kinds. Even before ICRU opened in Fall 2006, though, the Honors Research Practicum had long been supporting student research by awarding academic credit for student collaboration on research with faculty mentors. And now the credit can count toward Honors Commendations.
Top opportunities for scholarships, graduate and professional study, as well as employment turn increasingly these days on skills and experiences in research pursued by undergraduates. Some institutions focus on kinds and arenas of research thought especially suited to beginners. Iowa does some of this, but it emphasizes bringing talented undergraduates as fully and rapidly as possible into professional levels and venues for research. As a result, Iowa undergraduates often tackle particularly challenging questions and enjoy remarkably strong reputations.
At Iowa, the same holds for creative and performing arts. This University invented the master’s degree for fine arts to give academic support to work throughout the arts, and Iowa continues a leader in art and art history, dance, cinema theory and production, musical composition and performance, theater, and writing. The Honors Research Practicum can credit artistic creation and performance as well as research, just as Honors at Iowa provides for culminating “Projects” as well as “Theses.”
But student research is not just for senior theses anymore. Undergraduates are often ready for significant research in their sophomore years, some even sooner. Iowa often starts students early by having them help professors who provide mentoring on methods, theories, and modes of analysis. The aspiration, often realized here, is for the relationship gradually to reverse itself, so that faculty members eventually are helping their former student assistants conduct inquiries of their own. (These student-initiated inquiries make some of the best Honors Theses.)