RHC Curriculum
RHC serves the highly motivated, high achieving student, and every aspect of its curriculum is designed to provide such students with the resources they need to meet their academic objectives. We combine the support of a strong community with the freedom to pursue individual goals. In this way we emphasize student ownership and direction of their own education. At the same time, we recognize that it is our responsibility to support students so that they can explore, reflect upon, and achieve their educational objectives.
RHC Works With All Majors
This RHC curriculum works in tandem with all Hofstra majors. It does not require extra courses nor extra time to complete the degree. Quite the opposite is true, as RHC students usually proceed more quickly than most through their Hofstra degree requirements. In short, RHC students pursue any of Hofstra’s 140 majors while simultaneously earning honors credits needed to fulfill the requirements for one of the RHC designations.
The Goal: An RHC Designation
All RHC students are working to attain a designation that marks their diploma and transcript as having been achieved with an extraordinary level of distinction.
Your First Year in RHC
All first year RHC students begin their collegiate career with a common curricular experience called Culture and Expression (C&E). C&E is a year-long four-course cluster of classes designed specifically for RHC students.
Years Two-Four
In the second through fourth years, RHC students tailor their honors educational experience by choosing from among RHC Seminars and Honors Options that can be used to enrich any regularly offered Hofstra course. It is in these years that RHC students design their own honors curriculum to fit their passions and interests.
Study Abroad
Honors College does not offer its own Study Abroad programs, but we wholeheartedly encourage students to participate in Study Abroad programs either through Hofstra or through other programs (under advisement). Hofstra has many excellent programs during the January term and several summer semester terms. For a full semester or year, students can go abroad through other university programs and transfer the credit back to Hofstra. We also encourage students to participate in service programs or internships abroad. To that end, RHC makes it possible to earn honors credit for any organized experience abroad (study, service, internship, but not cruises or tourism!) by developing a structured journal abroad (by arrangement with Assistant Dean Lauren Burignat-Kozol) that allows you to reflect upon, to extend and deepen, the impressions of cultural difference you are going to have anyway over there, --wherever that may be! In other words, Honors College gives you credit for thinking about what you see and hear and read and learn and experience in another culture, and how it differs from what you are already familiar with at home. Study Abroad offers already, inevitably, the kind of value-added enrichment we want you to have in every course here at Hofstra, where every detail of daily life will take on new meaning in a new, unfamiliar cultural context, so we just ask that you chronicle the process whereby you recognize and begin to understand those differences that will in turn give you a better understanding also of your home culture.
RHC students can earn up to 6 honors credits for separate experiences abroad (3 cr. each for journals based in different cultures / locations).