Join the Honors Program

Honors logoInspiring talented, high-performing students from diverse backgrounds to dream big, the Honors Program supports students to discover the best within themselves, while helping them to develop the path from where they are now to where they can be.

If you are interested in joining the Honors Program, then chances are you have a desire to learn and therefore possess a singular tendency to embrace the promise of self-improvement, along with the audacity to ask big questions. (See "What Is Intellectual Curiosity?" below.)

The Honors Program is designed to

  • Challenge students to achieve their intellectual and leadership potential through academically rich experiences
  • Improve students' critical thinking, writing, and discussion skills
  • Help students understand the connections between disciplines
  • Encourage campus engagement for students seeking to develop their interests, talents, character and intellectual promise through lived experiences
  • Support student awareness of campus and community resources, scholarships, research opportunities and summer enrichment programs

How to Join

Honors Courses

Enroll in an Honors course and study at a university level.


What Is Intellectual Curiosity?

It simply means demonstrating a joy for learning that moves beyond the basic requirements of a course to better understand subjects that matter the most to you – an inspired act of learning that is fun and authentic to you.

Many universities appreciate this quality in their transfer applicants. For example, among the supplemental essay prompts, Stanford University asks applicants to “[reflect] on an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning.”

There are many ways to show intellectual curiosity:

  • Actively exploring your interests through rigorous scholarship in areas of arts, humanities, math, and sciences
  • Working with faculty members and pursuing independent research outside the traditional classroom
  • Recognizing crucial challenges facing society and honing your leadership instincts
  • Learning to honor life’s mysteries with patience, curiosity, and the promise of self-improvement, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves ... Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Intellectual curiosity, in sum, is a source of motivation that continues after term papers have been submitted, after exams have been taken, and after transfer applications have been filed.

Are you driven to engage in ongoing conversations with the transformative ideas you will invariably discover in college – and then try to live everything? 

Contact Us

Tom Nguyen

Email: dahonors@deanza.edu

Or make an appointment with Tom Nguyen, Honors Program coordinator

Make an Appointment

Apply Now!

Follow Us Online

Upcoming Events

Back to Top