Universities like Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth and Cornell offer honors seminars to their best students, giving qualified students an opportunity to study closely with top professors. Bilkent will begin a comparable honors seminar for humanities and social science students for the 2008-2009 academic years, limited to fifteen students with at least a 3.3 GPA. Priority would go to seniors and then juniors.
Advantages for students include an opportunity to take a seminar course limited to a small number of gifted and serious peers; exposure to a broad range of texts and theoretical approaches to issues related to graduate study in the humanities or social sciences; the benefit of continuous small group and one-on-one interaction with a professor on a piece of academic writing which can be used in the graduate program application process; a detailed and positive letter of recommendation from a professor who knows your work and interests well; and can be a valuable addition to a résumé and transcript. The likelihood of acceptance and scholarship potentials for graduate study in North America or Europe also increase.
The honors seminar will be open to qualified students from many different faculties of the University, and should be particularly useful for students interested in doing graduate study in the social sciences or humanities.
The idea for implementing this honors seminar at Bilkent belongs to Prof. Talat Halman, the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Letters. The seminar will be offered by faculty members from the Program in Cultures, Civilizations & Ideas. For further information, interested students may check the CCI web page at: http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~cci/
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