All Honors College students are REQUIRED to take at least one Interdisciplinary Honors Seminar (IHS) within your first four semesters; with special permission, you may extend this requirement to the second semester of your junior year.
Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars invite students and faculty to think about complex problems and issues across disciplinary boundaries. The seminars enable students to explore emergent fields and specialties while developing a breadth of foundational knowledge at the start of their academic careers at Rutgers.
Rather than deferring advanced concepts and questions to upper-level courses, Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars initiate sophisticated scholarly discussions in our students’ first years, eliciting the genuine curiosity that makes them eager to learn more.
Usually limited to 18 students, these seminars broaden students’ perspectives and place knowledge in context, providing Honors students with the opportunity to find their intellectual passions—to discover the ideas that capture their imagination, focus their attention, and inspire them to delve more deeply.
Graduates of our College often find the experience so rewarding that they regularly take more than one seminar, telling us that the Honors Interdisciplinary Seminars are "the most stimulating learning environment" that they have had at Rutgers.
Special Sections of Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars
The Honors College has several formats and frameworks for uniquely designed and taught sections of Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars. They range in format, substance, approach, and goals, but are an excellent way to learn more deeply through a pedagogical and/or topical focus, intertwine your own interests with new dimensions, and find a broader learning community.
Coordinated Online International Learning
Designed to offer an international perspective but through the use of technology rather than travel, these are classes co-taught and coordinated with a class at an international university that includes at least one substantive and extended unit of study (of three weeks) that requires engagement, in real-time and asynchronously, with the students and fellow faculty from that university.
LGBTQ+ Learning Collaborative Themes
As part of our fully-articulated Learning Collaborative, we offer courses that explore the depths and dimensions of LGBTQ+ issues. Intended not only for those who may identify with the various communities, but equally so those who are allies or who see the need to understand the myriad of topics and issues in and among the communities and their presence in a larger social framework, these classes are a rich opportunity to learn something more dynamic and pedagogically expansive.
Embedded Travel-Study Seminars
Enroll in a semester-long course while adding a ten-day travel study on as an extra component. Previous courses have included travel to South Africa, Japan, Costa Rica, and Ireland, all as a way of taking students on an extended series of site visits to put their learning into context. When available funding permits, the Honors College helps to defray the costs of the travel-study program.
Cross-Cultural Communities Topical Seminar
The CCC Topical Seminars--we aim to offer at least two sections every semester--are an outgrowth of the CCC class as originated and designed by our students in 2021, centered on the ways that various communities intersect with an issue or topic and the ways that they digress. These courses are a way for students to study a topic across communities--of viewpoints, ethnicity, nationalism, gender, and more--to see how the issues are comparatively framed through language, experiences, histories, ideologies, and practices.
In 2025-2026 the four sections will be focused on environmentalism and health care, one each in both semesters.
Most Recent IHS Course Listings