Our Mission, Objectives & Community

OUR MISSION

The mission of Kilachand Honors College is to offer a challenging interdisciplinary liberal arts education grounded in critical and creative thinking and problem-solving related to important local, global, social, and geopolitical challenges. Kilachand’s integrated, four-year curriculum is augmented by an extensive series of co-curricular events and culminates in a substantial work of empirical or scholarly research, creativity, or invention by the close of the senior year. All of these endeavors occur within a supportive and diverse living-learning community that offers educational experiences similar to those of a small liberal arts college but with the resources and intellectual depth of a major urban research university.

OUR COMMUNITY

Kilachand students pursue majors and minors across the ten undergraduate schools and colleges and the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. All our first-year students live together in Kilachand Hall*, where the College advisors, staff, and directors also have offices. Community and co-curricular events that enhance the educational goals of the college are also held in Kilachand Hall, and offer students opportunities for frequent, informal interactions with faculty and staff.

OUR STUDENTS

The students who thrive at Kilachand are intellectually curious and courageous, and they want to put their knowledge to use to benefit their communities. We seek students who wish to study an array of subjects across disciplines, as well as focus deeply on their major interests. The Kilachand curriculum asks students to use the tools and methods of every academic discipline to understand global challenges and develop practical solutions. Through rigorous courses and co-curricular events, students hone their capacity for critical reasoning and effective communication, skills that are crucial to every academic, intellectual, and socially responsible enterprise as well as to that all-important pursuit of shaping an engaged and fulfilling life beyond the university.

OUR LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Students will be exposed to different domains of knowledge and research methods in the arts, sciences, and professional schools and will understand disciplinary differences and similarities as to what constitutes data and knowledge in various fields.
• Students will learn to formulate and discuss questions of high scientific, social, ethical, and aesthetic significance and share their conclusions with a broad audience.
• Students will be exposed to a variety of research methodologies and develop the ability to plan and execute an intensive senior research project, the Kilachand Keystone Project.
• Students will learn excellent oral and written communication and presentation skills that allow them to communicate with diverse audiences.
• Students will hone their creative and critical thinking skills and apply them to complicated problems of great contemporary relevance
• Students will learn that the global challenges we face as a civilization must be analyzed and tackled with a diverse range of methodologies and tools.