About

Our Mission

The mission of the Thomas Hunter Honors Program (THHP) is to support outstanding students pursuing interdisciplinary studies. Thinking in an interdisciplinary way often requires drawing on methods and analytical frameworks from more than one area of knowledge (the social sciences, the physical sciences, and the humanities) or specific field (history, physics, or philosophy) to examine a topic or solve a problem. The THHP allows students to either pursue their studies within a traditional departmental major or to create their own interdisciplinary major.

The Program prides itself on its highly attentive advising. Students in the THHP know that they have almost immediate access to a faculty advisor when they need help with academic or bureaucratic problems, or when they wish to discuss more general questions and long-range goals, such as applying to graduate or professional school. All students are required to meet with an advisor at least once a semester to discuss their general progress and to have their academic programs approved. But more casual conversations with advisors are also encouraged.

THHP students and faculty meet every semester at a party during which the following semester's colloquia are presented. In addition, the Program hosts scholarly lectures, graduation parties, and other social events. Students tell us that the THHP feels like a small, friendly community within the bigger, sometimes more anonymous-seeming college. THHP students and alumni may continue to see advisors, attend lectures, orientations, end-of-term parties and other social events.

Program Outcomes

THHP students are often valedictorians and salutatorians at graduation, and typically constitute about half of the students inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. With the help of their faculty advisors, they successfully apply for undergraduate and graduate scholarships and fellowships and have a high rate of acceptance for admission to the graduate and professional schools to which they apply, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and NYU.

Since 1997, Hunter students have won 133 major national fellowships. Of these 39 (30%) have been graduates of the Thomas Hunter Honors Program. These include Hunter's only Marshall Scholar and Hunter's only Truman Scholar. In addition, THHP students have won Beinecke, Mellon, Goldwater, National Science Foundation, and Javits Fellowships, all in the last twenty years.

In 2017, THHP students won a Marshall Scholarship to study in the UK, a Fulbright Scholarship to study in South Africa, and a Jonas Salk Fellowship to attend Harvard University's Medical School.

In 2021-2022, THHP students won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. Two students were selected as Goldwater Fellows, and two additional students were awarded Fulbright Scholarships to study in Mexico and France.