Designing an Honors Peer Advising Center

...As we transition from honors program to college, our services are growing in scope and complexity, as are our responsibilities. We need a new way to provide reliable, personalized honors student support.

Learning centers have been shown to increase student retention, satisfaction, academic achievement, and self-reliance, all outcomes that we hope to foster as we grow. And while community connection and campus involvement are instrumental in helping all students thrive, it has shown to be particularly essential for honors students, who need a community of academic peers.

Fortunately, Honors at Virginia Tech already has a thriving culture of peer education: our peer educators are the primary instructors of our first-year seminars and reading seminars, classes that are taken by hundreds of students every semester and that consistently receive outstanding course evaluations.

Therefore, to increase student support in the context of our intellectual community, we decided to create a learning center grounded in our strength: an Honors Peer Advising Center.