Empowering the next generation of thinkers and doers for our state and beyond.
What becomes possible because Honors is here at Marshall?
The Honors College at Marshall University combines academic challenge with integrative and experiential learning that helps students connect knowledge across disciplines, apply what they learn in real-world settings, and develop as thoughtful, adaptable, and socially responsible people. Our students come from every academic college at Marshall and carry what they learn through Honors into fields including healthcare, engineering, technology, education, research, business, public service, and the arts.
Through partnerships with faculty, academic units, community organizations, employers, government agencies, donors, and international institutions, Honors students encounter opportunities to conduct research, study abroad, lead, serve, intern, collaborate, and engage complex problems beyond the boundaries of a traditional classroom.
We are increasingly interested not simply in documenting what opportunities the Honors College offers, but in understanding what students are able to do, understand, and become through them. We are committed to documenting measurable outcomes and examining how Honors experiences contribute to student retention, completion, career preparation, intellectual and personal growth, and longer-term success.
At its core, the Honors College demonstrates that an excellent undergraduate education is not simply preparation for a first job. It can cultivate the curiosity, judgment, relationships, adaptability, and sense of purpose students need to contribute meaningfully throughout their lives.
A Growing Evidence Base
The Honors College is building a student-centered evidence system that brings together student reflections, supported-project deliverables, program assessments, student profiles, and other documented experiences. This work allows us to look beyond participation counts and ask deeper questions: What changed for students? How did it happen? Why did it matter? What became possible afterward?
Our first publication from this developing evidence system, Our Honors Impact: Evidence of Honors Student Experience and Outcomes, examines recurring patterns in students’ lived experiences of Honors education. As our evidence base grows to include more forms of leadership, mentoring, research, internships, community engagement, curricular experiences, and other opportunities, it will provide an increasingly comprehensive picture of the value and impact of Honors education at Marshall.
Read Our Honors Impact: Evidence of Honors Student Experience and Outcomes on Marshall Digital Scholar.
One example of this work in practice is the Honors College’s leadership in the West Virginia–Ireland Transatlantic Partnership. Through a homegrown faculty-led study abroad program involving students from Marshall and BridgeValley Community and Technical College, Honors demonstrated how two-year/four-year partnerships can expand access to meaningful global learning for students from a broad range of academic, geographic, and personal backgrounds. That work helped inform the creation of the West Virginia–Ireland Education Alliance in state law, designed to strengthen academic, cultural, and workforce connections between West Virginia and Ireland.
Aligned Partner Initiatives
The Honors College’s WV–Ireland Transatlantic Partnership began with a faculty-led study abroad program based at Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT), creating Marshall’s first homegrown international program designed and delivered by our own faculty.
Developed in collaboration with BridgeValley Community and Technical College and partners in Ireland, the initiative expands access to global learning for rural, STEM, transfer, first-generation, and other students who have historically been underrepresented in study abroad opportunities.
By linking a two-year and four-year institution in a shared international experience, the partnership creates new pathways for West Virginia students to gain meaningful global experience while remaining rooted in their home institutions and communities.
While in Ireland, students earn academic credit through the Certificate in Cultural Landscapes of Ireland while exploring the cultural and natural landscapes of the Boyne Valley, engaging with community partners, and examining transatlantic connections relevant to West Virginia—including community resilience, cultural heritage, entrepreneurship, tourism, regional development, and innovation.
Student reflections demonstrate the impact of this experience. Participants describe learning through direct engagement with place, gaining confidence and independence, building lasting relationships, and developing a deeper understanding of both Ireland and Appalachia. Many return home with a renewed appreciation for West Virginia and a stronger understanding of how regional communities around the world confront shared challenges and opportunities.
“Going on this trip has opened my eyes to the history that connects so many of us across Appalachia.”
— Kadence Crank
What began as a study abroad initiative has grown into a broader Marshall University WV–Ireland Transatlantic Partnership supporting academic collaboration, student mobility, faculty engagement, workforce development, and emerging institutional relationships in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The partnership has also helped inform statewide conversations about educational collaboration between West Virginia and Ireland, contributing to the development of the West Virginia–Ireland Education Alliance. Today, the initiative provides a working model for how international partnerships can simultaneously expand global opportunities for students while strengthening connections to West Virginia’s future.
Learn more about how Honors students are broadening their horizons through Ireland Study Abroad.
The Honors Incubator Pathway is where creativity meets practical problem-solving. This experiential learning initiative guides a small number of selected Honors students to identify meaningful challenges, apply design thinking, and develop innovative solutions. Through mentorship and collaboration, participants gain entrepreneurial skills and experience that prepare them to address complex problems in West Virginia and beyond.
From sustainability projects to community-driven innovations, the Honors Incubator creates space for students to move from ideas to action while developing the collaborative, creative, and analytical habits at the heart of integrative Honors education.
Learn more about how the Honors College is empowering students through experiential learning. Discover the Incubator.
The TEDxMarshallU Honors Internship (HON 490) equips students with the skills to organize and execute a TEDx event from concept to stage. Over two semesters, students assume meaningful responsibility for event planning, speaker support, marketing, media production, communication, and other dimensions of a complex public event.
The experience gives students opportunities to practice leadership, collaboration, project management, storytelling, technical production, and professional communication while contributing to a public forum for ideas that can move people to think differently and take action.
Learn more about how Honors students bring big ideas to life. Discover TEDxMarshallU.
Design for Defense (HON 481) challenges students to solve real-world defense problems in collaboration with the National Strategic Innovation Network. This course fosters innovative thinking, teamwork, and practical problem-solving, connecting students with professionals tackling complex security challenges. Participants gain invaluable experience addressing issues critical to national and global security.
Learn more about how Honors students are designing solutions for the future. Discover Design for Defense.
Key Outcomes and Highlights
Retention and Graduation
- Honors students graduate at rates approximately 20% higher than their peers nationally and more than twice as high at Marshall University.
- Marshall Honors students demonstrate strong retention and completion rates that substantially exceed institutional averages.
- Alongside these institutional outcomes, students describe relationships with peers, faculty, mentors, and programs that contribute to belonging, purpose, and continued engagement with their education.
Workforce and Future Contribution
- Honors students and alumni pursue careers across sectors central to West Virginia’s future, including healthcare, education, technology, engineering, advanced manufacturing, research, public service, entrepreneurship, and the creative economy.
- Their Honors experiences complement preparation in their majors by emphasizing adaptable and durable capacities: critical thinking, communication, ethical judgment, collaboration, leadership, problem-solving, intellectual flexibility, and the ability to learn across contexts.
- Increasingly, student evidence also allows us to see how professional aspirations connect to place and purpose. Some students explicitly describe plans to apply their education to healthcare access, environmental sustainability, research, education, and community needs in West Virginia and Appalachia.
Experiential Learning
- Honors students participate in experiential learning opportunities including internships, undergraduate research, leadership development, community engagement, study abroad, professional conferences, mentoring, innovation-focused coursework, and other applied experiences.
- Student reflections show that these experiences can help students connect classroom learning to real-world contexts, build confidence and adaptability, form meaningful relationships, discover connections across disciplines, and better understand their own interests and aspirations.
- Many students make an important distinction between learning about something and encountering it directly. Places, organizations, professional communities, research settings, and relationships can become part of the learning itself.
What Students Tell Us About Impact
As the Honors College listens more systematically to students, several recurring patterns are becoming visible. They help us understand not only what outcomes students experience, but how those outcomes develop.
Learning Becomes Real
Students repeatedly describe direct engagement with places, people, problems, artifacts, research environments, and professional settings as making academic knowledge tangible. These encounters can reveal connections across fields that previously seemed separate.
For Flo Napier, experiencing the 5,000-year-old passage tomb at Newgrange brought engineering, history, archaeology, astronomy, art, and culture into a single intellectual frame:
“I didn’t realize that culture, engineering, and history could all be simultaneously directly connected. Now I know better and want to know even more.”
— Flo Napier
This is the kind of learning the Honors College means by integrative learning: not simply encountering multiple disciplines, but recognizing meaningful relationships among knowledge, experience, people, and place.
Growth Happens Through Challenge and Connection
Students also describe becoming more confident, independent, and adaptable when they encounter unfamiliar situations with meaningful support around them. Challenge matters, but students rarely describe challenge alone. Peers, faculty, mentors, and communities frequently become part of how they learn to navigate uncertainty.
For Kayleigh Garcia, finding community at Marshall changed her willingness to participate and take risks:
“It wasn’t until I joined my first club that I started to feel like I belonged. That’s something I truly love about Marshall—we support each other like a family.”
— Kayleigh Garcia
A supportive community does not simply make students comfortable. At its best, it gives them a foundation from which they can stretch beyond what is comfortable.
Investment Expands Possibility
Scholarships, Honors Council Grants, and donor-supported resources do more than reduce expenses. They can change what students are able to do.
Financial support can make study abroad attainable, place undergraduate research before professional audiences, provide access to museums and cultural institutions that become part of academic work, or reduce financial pressures while students prepare for careers of public importance.
Megan Griffey, a Biological Sciences student preparing for medicine, connects the support she receives directly to her goal of practicing family medicine in rural West Virginia:
“Your support plays a crucial role in allowing me to achieve my goal of helping to bring medical access to rural areas.”
— Megan Griffey
The return on an investment in students may therefore continue well beyond the moment when funds are awarded. Support creates access; access creates experience; and experience can shape learning, professional direction, and future contribution.
Expanding Horizons Can Strengthen Home
One of the most distinctive patterns in current student evidence is that engagement with the wider world can deepen rather than weaken students’ connection to Appalachia. Students studying abroad describe recognizing similarities between West Virginia and other regional communities, reconsidering stereotypes about Appalachia, encountering different approaches to familiar problems, and developing a new appreciation for home through comparison.
The educational value of global learning is therefore not simply becoming knowledgeable about somewhere else. Comparison can make the familiar newly visible. By engaging the wider world, students can develop broader perspectives while also acquiring new ways of understanding and strengthening the places they call home.
Explore these findings and more in Our Honors Impact: Evidence of Honors Student Experience and Outcomes.
How We Align with West Virginia’s Priorities
Workforce Readiness
Honors students receive rigorous preparation in fields critical to West Virginia’s future, including healthcare, engineering, technology, education, research, business, and public service.
In tandem with their major programs, Honors experiences emphasize adaptable, career-ready capacities including critical thinking, ethical decision-making, communication, collaboration, leadership, problem-solving, and the ability to integrate knowledge across contexts. These are not tied to a single occupation; they help graduates continue learning and contributing as professions and industries change.
Economic & Community Impact
Through partnerships with state agencies, businesses, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and community partners, the Honors College creates pathways for students to encounter real community and workforce needs.
Students and alumni contribute through research, innovation, entrepreneurship, healthcare, education, public service, creative work, and civic leadership. The college seeks not only to prepare individual students for success but also to help them understand how their knowledge and abilities can become resources for the communities around them.
Developing Future Leaders
The Honors College cultivates leadership not simply as holding a position, but as the ability to work responsibly with others, exercise judgment, communicate effectively, act ethically, and contribute toward shared purposes.
Honors Ambassadors, peer mentoring, student organizations, community-engaged experiences, internships, and other leadership opportunities give students practical settings in which to develop those capacities while serving peers, the university, and broader communities.
Global Engagement for West Virginia
Through initiatives such as the West Virginia–Ireland Transatlantic Partnership, Honors students connect regional issues—including health, entrepreneurship, cultural heritage, workforce development, community resilience, sustainability, and innovation—to comparative international contexts.
Student evidence suggests that comparison itself is educationally powerful. Students recognize connections between Irish and Appalachian landscapes, histories, identities, music, migration, and regional stereotypes. Others encounter sustainability practices or different approaches to community challenges and begin imagining what those experiences might mean for Appalachia.
Global engagement and regional commitment need not compete. Students can be prepared for the world while also being prepared to contribute more meaningfully to home.
By engaging the wider world, students often discover new ways of understanding and strengthening the places they call home.
The Honors College Difference
Impact in Practice
The larger patterns of Honors impact become clearest in the individual experiences of students. These stories illustrate different ways that learning, relationships, support, challenge, and opportunity can become consequential.
Josie Barker, Biological Sciences
Taking Undergraduate Research into a Professional Community
With support from an Honors Council Grant, Josie traveled to Washington, D.C., to present microbiology research at the ASM Microbe Conference. Her work on Streptococcus pneumoniae placed undergraduate scholarship in conversation with scientists and professionals working on questions of antibiotic resistance and public health. The experience expanded Josie’s professional network, strengthened her scientific communication skills, and reinforced her commitment to graduate study and continued microbiological research at Marshall.
Maggie Dickerson, Civil Engineering
Bringing Sustainability Lessons Back to Appalachia
An Honors Council Grant helped support Maggie’s participation in a field course in Costa Rica focused on tropical biology, conservation, and sustainability. She encountered renewable-energy systems, sustainable agriculture, conservation research, and community practices that connected directly with her interests in environmental engineering. Rather than treating those practices as lessons belonging somewhere else, Maggie began considering how they might inform her future work in Appalachia. Her experience demonstrates how global learning can generate ideas with regional relevance.
Haleigh Muncy, Psychology and English
Preparing to Return and Serve Rural West Virginia
Haleigh’s professional aspirations are directly connected to the community she calls home. She plans to pursue advanced study in clinical psychology and return to rural West Virginia as a child clinical psychologist, helping address gaps in mental-health access that she has seen firsthand. Her story illustrates a form of achievement deeply aligned with the public purpose of Honors education: developing professional capacity not simply for personal advancement, but for meaningful contribution.
“Knowing that I could have the option to come back and help the people that I’ve seen struggle is definitely something that I’m very passionate about.”
Gabriella Sevilla, Video Production
Creating Stories that Inspire Change
As an intern for TEDxMarshallU, Gabriella gained hands-on experience directing the live stream and producing professional-quality videos of the event’s talks. Her work required technical expertise, creativity, collaboration, and responsibility in a real public-production environment. The experience helped propel her toward work with HerdVision and illustrates how an Honors experience can serve as a bridge between academic development and professional practice.
Darby McGinnis, Biological Sciences
Bringing Entrepreneurship to Life
In an Honors seminar focused on sustainability strategies, Darby developed a concept for a mobile florist business. Market research and collaboration with a design firm ultimately produced a three-dimensional rendering of the idea, moving the project from an abstract concept toward a testable model. Her work illustrates the Honors College’s commitment to learning that asks students not only to generate ideas, but to investigate their feasibility and consider how they might function in practice.
Kayleigh Garcia, Psychology
Belonging as a Foundation for Growth
Kayleigh arrived at Marshall uncertain about where she would find community. Engagement with student organizations and the Honors College gradually created what she has described as a “home away from home.” From that foundation she expanded into leadership, mentoring, professional development, and international learning. Her experience illustrates an important relationship increasingly visible in student evidence: belonging and challenge are not opposites. A strong sense of connection can give students the confidence to explore opportunities that once seemed intimidating or beyond reach.
