Being an Honors fellow has been my most formative experience at Elon University. A two year, self-driven but faculty mentored research thesis is the hallmark of the honors experience. The honors program is set up to scaffold you through this process and connects you with all the opportunities available to augment your research and your academic career. Elon has a plethora of resources that are particularly useful for any student doing research and the honors program ensures that we are fully aware of all of them.
My research mentor and I met because of the direction of the then honors program director. With the help of my mentor, I applied for and received the Lumen Prize spring of my sophomore year – a semester before honors fellows start proposing their research. The Lumen Prize is a $15,000 research grant given annually to 15 Elon sophomores. It allowed me to travel to Senegal, West Africa for 6 months and also spend 2 months in New York City in order to complete my research on Senegalese migration narratives.
The honors program exposes us to different resources available on and off campus. Early on, we were introduced to the office of National and International Fellowships. With their support, I applied for the Boren Scholarship – a federal program that supports students in their efforts to study abroad in less commonly studied abroad locations and learn critical need languages that are usually not taught in universities. I was able to spend two months at the University of Florida studying Wolof, the lingua-franca of Senegal, before I embarked on my research.
In addition, the Honors program creates a community like no other. Honors fellows are in the same orientation group together, and take Elon 101, Core 110 and other courses together. From the start we were welcomed to Elon wholeheartedly, and had a cohort of people with a similar commitment to their education to befriend immediately. The directors of the program also took the time to get to know us and made an effort to create a community that we could thrive in. Honors fellows have two learning communities available to them, I chose to live in neither but between the activities and classes we had together for 4 semesters, people from the various honors cohorts became my closest friends.
Being an Elon student opens many doors to you. In addition to being challenging and intellectually stimulating, the honors program allows you to take advantage of all these opportunities at Elon and beyond.
-Omolayo Ojo ’15