Student Profiles
Louis Gularte
Philosophy and Psychology
Class of 2008
Gonzales, CA
"For me, the Honors Program offers two excellent resources: first, high-quality professors and classes in all academic areas, and second, a group of friends with a larger-than-average intellectual interest and academic focus.
"For example, the Honors Program definitely helped me in my entertaining and enjoyable transitions from Engineering/Arts and Letters Undecided to Arts and Letters Preprofessional/Math to my current Philosophy and Psychology majors. Even if you stick with one batch of majors from the beginning, the Honors Program helps you get great classes in every area you want to be challenged in. You don’t have to be in constant identity crisis mode and switch your majors just to get those stellar professors and stimulating courses.
"As a social-academic resource, the Honors Program’s benefits were first very clear in the first year honors seminars. The discussion was always stimulating and thought provoking. A lot of my friends and I still refer back to discussions we had in those seminars. And now, until I get going on my thesis, the Honors Program means a group of friends who are simply more disposed to discussing their classes with me and mine with them, who are more likely to be able to spurt off random facts about broadly different fields of study.
"That Honors Program network, including its faculty and staff, has added immensely to my experience here; a concrete example is a Moral Philosophy lecture by Professor MacIntyre that I attended. The lecture was sponsored by the Kaneb Center (the Honors Program’s Professor Hahn is its director), and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gone to the lecture if it weren’t for the Honors Program’s alerting me to it. As it turns out, I believe I spent a full week thinking and dreaming continuously and only about that lecture. That’s the kind of experience the Honors Program encourages."
