The Academic Experience

Global Citizen Scholars Curriculum

The Honors Global Citizen Scholars Program (GCS) utilizes the timeless rigors of the liberal arts and humanities to confront the most critical challenges of our globalized age. In doing so, it prepares students for personal and professional lives that make positive impacts both in their communities and in our rapidly changing global society. Through strategic institutional, community, and international partnerships as well as innovative academic, experiential, and co-curricular programming, students become effective global citizens who engage meaningfully and effectively with diverse people, places, events, challenges, and opportunities. As part of the GCS program, every student commits to taking part in diversity initiatives and study abroad. The three primary qualities that define a GCS student are: global awareness (understanding the most important challenges facing all humans), global responsibility (exploring one’s ethical role in the world), and global participation (enacting changes that make a positive difference in the world).

The Global Citizen Scholars program offers a tailored honors curriculum with unique learning opportunities in the liberal arts and humanities, global learning, and U.S. diversity. Students in the Global Citizen Scholars Program complete:

• The Range program, a sequence of 1-credit seminars focused on Global Challenges and Purposeful Work.
• Johnson City: From Exploration to Impact: the understanding of Global Challenges begins with an awareness of the local. Students will engage in structured explorations of Johnson City through direct observations of select sites, mapping exercises, writing assignments, interviews, discussions, and readings. 
• Quest for Meaning and Values, a three-semester sequence of honors critical thinking seminars that use the humanities and liberal arts to cultivate cultural literacy, knowledge of diversity and inclusion, and ethical thinking, while deepening skills of critical thinking and writing.
• A required and fully-funded study abroad in the summer after the first year as part of the Quest sequence.
• An experiential learning requirement (second study abroad, internship, research abroad, or other approved activity)
• An honors capstone project in their field of study, a project informed by the rest of their curriculum, and pursued with an eye towards global awareness, global responsibility, and global participation.

Apply for the Global Citizen Scholars Program