Honors Courses

Explore the living world through the lens of Utah’s diverse ecosystems, from desert washes to alpine meadows. This interdisciplinary Honors General Education Breadth course introduces core concepts of life science while showing how ecology, pollination, and species interactions shape the landscapes around us. You’ll investigate how scientists use observation, modeling, and prediction to understand real ecological problems—tracking pollinators, mapping habitats, and asking how ecosystems change. Along the way, we’ll connect modern science to its historical roots and social contexts, examining how ecological knowledge influences land management, conservation, and food systems in the West. Through hands-on ethnobotanical activities and real-life field-based data collection, you’ll see how evidence is gathered, tested, and refined. Whether you’re fascinated by bees and butterflies, curious about wildflowers, or interested in how science guides real-world decisions, this course invites you to think like an ecologist and discover how life science helps us make sense of the world right outside your door.

This interdisciplinary one-credit Honors workshop develops students’ literacy in generative AI through four complementary perspectives: understanding AI, using AI, evaluating AI, and examining its ethical implications. Students will explore how generative models work at a conceptual level, gaining clarity about capabilities and limitations without needing advanced technical background. Through hands-on activities, they will practice effective and responsible AI use across academic, professional, and creative contexts. The course emphasizes critical evaluation—learning to assess accuracy, bias, transparency, and reliability in AI-generated outputs. Ethical discussions address authorship, equity, privacy, labor, and societal impact. Throughout the series, students will contextualize AI within their own disciplines, identities, and lived experiences, cultivating reflective, informed, and empowered engagement with generative technologies in an increasingly AI-mediated world.

Open to all engineering majors, with research focused on biological engineering.

This course provides an immersive, mentored research experience in biological engineering, pairing students with faculty-led research groups to engage in hands-on discovery from experimental design through dissemination. Students participate in structured professional development workshops focused on research identity, independence, collaboration, and communication. The experience includes developing an Honors Mentoring Agreement and culminates in a research poster presented at the university’s Spring Student Research Symposium.

Highly recommended for pre-med and biobehavioral science students.

Enroll in a small, Honors-only, hands-on mentored research experience in the NIH-supported Behavioral Economics Lab at Utah State University. In the lab, we employ preclinical models to study behavioral-economic mechanisms of impulsive decision-making. Our research is focused on developing interventions with clear biomedical relevance (e.g., reducing substance use, increasing medical treatment adherence). Each week you’ll join a 90-minute, journal-club style meeting to dissect a chapter or peer-reviewed article. In the lab (~6 hours/week), you’ll receive training and then help run humane, rewards-based animal (rat) behavior experiments. Students will maintain rigorous protocols and help graduate students analyze and graph data. Students who completed HONR 2100 can enroll in HONR 2200 to take on greater responsibility, propose new studies, and present findings at scientific conferences. However, HONR 2100 is not a prerequisite: students participating in the lab for the first time in HONR 2200 will focus on introductory experiences and may continue with HONR 2100 in the fall. In other words, students can get credit for two semesters of lab experience, and the two sections may be taken in any order.

Research can feel challenging, but also rewarding. This course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) will use research itself to investigate whether undergraduate research changes our cognition; does it help us engage in more effective critical thinking? Solve problems more efficiently? Engage in healthier decision-making processes? Prepare us with job-relevant skills? While asking such questions, this course covers basic principles of the research process including research ethics, study design, data collection, data analysis and interpretation, and results dissemination. Simultaneously, students will explore essential building blocks of human cognition, while reviewing literature. Students will gain experience in research article evaluation, survey development, data collection, data analysis, and sharing results via a research poster and recorded presentation, and possible publications. By the end of the course, students will be able to articulate and reflect on whether there are broad cognitive impacts of research that may make a difference in the real world.  

The Honors lab section pairs a peer group of academically engaged and curious Honors students with an outstanding Biology lab instructor. Honors students receive training and practice with experimentation before diverging from the standard laboratory sections. Honors students collaborate with and contribute to current research in the Department of Biology and disseminate findings in a research presentation shared with the National Institutes of Health and future Honors students. Due to the authentic collaboration and the nature of the research conducted, BIOL 1625-001 is designated a Research, Scholarship, and Creative Inquiry Intensive Course (RSCI).

This course teaches students to develop their own writing styles and voices, to integrate those voices with what others (often authorities) have to say about subjects, and to become stronger readers, writers, and thinkers. The class focuses on library and Internet research, appropriate documentation of such research, and persuasive writing. Students will evaluate sources, collaborate with classmates, and participate in peer-review of each other’s writing. Writing assignments emerge from a syllabus of topical and provocative readings, and students participate actively in class discussions, think carefully about the reading and writing assignments, and write several papers related to their own research interests.

While historians of war traditionally rely on texts to understand past conflict, this interdisciplinary course focuses on the material culture of modern war, with an emphasis on the First World War, the Second World War, and America’s Vietnam War. In addition to learning about these conflicts, students will have the opportunity in the second half of the class to engage meaningfully with our community’s material and historical past.

Honors students will have the special opportunity to help lead a public outreach roadshow associated with USU’s Bringing War Home Project, digitally collecting objects and object stories firsthand. Students in the Honors section will also have opportunities to learn about information management and work on developing the digital archive of objects and object stories, as well as research, pedagogical, and creative responses to the archive.

Engineers are responsible for designing and building infrastructure systems using applied scientific principles. This course introduces students to the history of engineering as a profession that shapes policymaking as well as communities. Structured as an upper-division survey course, this class focuses on the various engineering subdisciplines (aerospace, chemical, civil, electrical, mechanical, structural, etc.) in their professional capacity. Taking a global lens, students will learn the historical context of the professionalization of the engineer, innovations in the field, and the future of engineering in an ever-changing world. Students who take this course will demonstrate a strong understanding of the history of engineering from the earliest record to present day, while considering the social, cultural, and economic effects of engineering on societies.

This course teaches students about the scholarly products of research (papers, proposals, presentations, and poster sessions) and the peer-review processes associated with them.  We will also have several guest lectures about careers in various research settings: academia, national labs, large companies, and small start-ups. 
 
Undergraduate research provides an excellent opportunity for Honors students to complete an Honors Mentoring Agreement and may also serve as the foundation for an eventual Honors Capstone Project. ENGR 5970 (H) counts as both an Engineering technical elective and earns a total of 3 Honors points. 
 
Students must already have a research advisor prior to taking this class.  The intended audience is students who are established enough on their project to feel comfortable writing about it, but not so close to graduating that they won't continue their manuscripts beyond the scope of a one-semester class.