The Honors College,\ here at the university of Massachusetts Boston, is kicking off the 2015-2016 school year the right way. Since the Honors College has opened in 2013, freshmen enrollment has doubled. This fall semester, there were 200 new students enrolled at the Honors College. There is an overall of 550 students in the Honors College at UMass Boston.

The Honors College is filled with students who are academically ambitious and motivated. The Honors College focuses on the enhancement of students’ intellectual curiosity as well as inspiring academic excellence. The class of 2019 alone is one of the most diverse groups of freshmen enrolling into the Honors College, with 35% of those students being students of color. Students at the Honors College are enrolled in a variety of majors.

“In any of the honors seminars, they can have so many perspectives thinking about the same issue,” said Rajini Srikanth, Dean and Professor of English. “We bring together different fields of knowledge because we firmly believe, and we are also cultivating our students to believe, that the complex challenges that we face in the world today can only be addressed when we bring them inside from different disciplines.”

The Honors College is becoming a place for innovative teaching and learning techniques. The teachers emphasize taking one single issue and looking at it from multiple perspectives. This type of teaching leads to students having vibrant conversations that may turn into debates. The Honors College is able to encourage these discussions because the classroom settings are small: up to about 22 students in one class.

“I was both excited and also alarmed: excited because that kind of increase means people are listening to what we are saying and they now know of our existence,” said Srikanth. “The alarm is that, of course, we are still small in our staff and we want to make sure that we never compromise on our quality of support we give our students.”
The staff for the Honors College are big on making sure that they give each and every student everything that they need in order for the student to accomplish the goals that they have set for themselves. This small community within the bigger community of UMass Boston is definitely making positive change and is growing to have a bigger presence on campus.