- The University Honors Program draws on the wide range of resources available at a large urban university, concentrating on those resources within a small, personal, liberal-arts setting. Designed for students who want to satisfy their intellectual curiosity both inside and outside the classroom, the program is limited in size to 200 students who represent a wide variety of disciplines, backgrounds, and interests. A maximum of 50 students are selected for the program annually.
- The University Honors Program provides gifted and highly motivated students with an intimate, innovative, and challenging interdisciplinary course of study.
- The University Honors Program courses are team taught by faculty from various disciplines, including English, biology, engineering, biochemistry, business, psychology, and theology. Students take at least 33 hours of Honors coursework to graduate. Without delaying process towards degree the University Honors Program provides students with an opportunity to participate in a community of committed scholars, to form close relationships with faculty, to explore new ideas, and to share their ideas, interests, and lives on a daily basis in the Honors House.
- Students have frequent individual contact with the teaching faculty and have numerous opportunities for independent projects and research related to the central theme.
- UAB Honors Program courses are organized thematically and cover a broad range of material so that students are introduced to all the areas covered by the core curriculum requirements and to a wide variety of other areas as well. Topics of past courses have included: “The Nature/Nurture Debate,” “Ethics,” “Creativity in the Arts and Sciences” and “The Environment: Earth, Air, Fire and Water.” The courses change each year.
- Through the Honors Program, students are given opportunities to participate in numerous extracurricular activities and social-service projects each year.
- Students in the UAB Honors Program have won major scholarships and awards, including Rhodes, Marshall, Truman and Fulbright and the National Science Foundation fellowships