Honors Students FAQ

No. Taking Honors courses outside of your major can be beneficial in demonstrating versatility in your interests! However, if you’re planning to transfer into a specific major at university, it’s a good idea to complete some Honors coursework in the required classes for that major.

Instructors are not required to mentor Honors students. When they agree to mentor you, it means they volunteer to dedicate their personal free time to help you. If an instructor declines to work with you, it may be because they have other obligations to fulfill and do not have that extra free time.

To increase the chances that your instructor would want to help you you should try to demonstrate your skills and motivation as one of the best students in their class, go to their office hours to express your interest in working with them, and propose at least a few developed ideas of what you would want to work on (and make sure it connects to the material that they teach in the course).

If an instructor is not Honors Certified (i.e. they do not have an Embedded Honors Course), they might not know how an Honors course works. Be prepared to explain the program to them. 

If it is early in the semester and you really want to complete an Honors class in a specific subject, you may consider dropping the section and enrolling with a different instructor. Before you do this, it is essential to ask your new instructor if they are willing to enroll you in their class and work with you on Honors coursework. The Honors Program Canvas page has a list of Honors-certified instructors in different subjects who are interested in working with Honors students.

Note: You can only turn your course into Honors if the official instructor of that course agrees to mentor you. You CANNOT have another faculty mentor if they are not the official instructor for the class you are enrolled in. 

The application for the UC transfer agreements opens in the fall semester of each school year. The agreement with these universities is that you have to complete 5 Honors Courses by the time you graduate. You do not have to have all 5 of them completed by the time you apply, but you should be on track to complete them by the spring semester before you transfer. That is why it's important to sign up for Honors courses at the beginning of the term, so that there are records of you being on track.

For UCLA TAP, you should be aware of what majors are eligible to apply using UCLA TAP. Only majors within the College of Letters and Sciences (L&S) are eligible to apply for TAP.

Majors that do not qualify would be in Schools of Engineering & Applied Science, Architecture, Music, Nursing, Theatre, Film and Television, Public Affairs, or Education & Information Studies, which are not eligible for UCLA TAP.

You should also be aware that you can apply for an alternate major; however, that major must also be part of the College of Letters and Sciences (L&S), and the major must not be impacted, like psychology, political science, and others. This means that if a major is not part of the College of Letters and Sciences or if it is considered impacted, it cannot be used for your alternate major. For impacted majors, you must declare that major as your primary major and use a backup major that is related to your primary major as your secondary major (e.g., Primary: psychology, Alternate: Linguistics and Psychology).

It's important to note that the list of impacted majors changes every year, so it's important to check the most up-to-date information on UCLA TAP's website: https://tap.ucla.edu/

It is important to meet all the admission requirements for the college and BOTH of your majors, so meet with your LPC counselor to go over the requirements for both of your majors and use ASSIST to see what courses are transferable to UCLA and other institutions that have articulation agreements with LPC.

Visit the transfer agreements website to learn more:

https://www.laspositascollege.edu/honors/transfer-agreements.php