Selection Process

Students are selected to participate in the Cook College General (four-year) Honors Program prior to the first year at Cook.

From November through March, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions ( Rutgers University - New Brunswick) submits to the Honors Programs Office the names and addresses of admitted students who meet the following initial criteria:

• Combined SAT I scores of 1260 and above;
• Secondary school grade-point average of 3.5 (on a 4.0 scale);
• Cook College indicated as the first or second choice of New Brunswick colleges. (See note on Cook College at the end. Students for whom Cook College is a third choice, but have combined SAT I scores of 1400 or above are also considered.);
• Application submitted by the first-year deadline (December 1 st).

These students (typically several hundred) are invited to attend the General Honors Program Interview Day, which takes place midweek in late March or early April (avoiding the typical New Jersey secondary school spring/religious holiday schedule).

The Honors Interview

Approximately 75 students request to be interviewed for the program. Students and their parents are invited to attend the on-campus interview. While the students respond to a one-hour essay question, the families meet with the college’s academic and student life deans to answer any questions they may have about the program or Cook College.

After lunch, students are interviewed individually by members of the Cook College faculty and participate in a small group interview with a faculty member and honors program students. Honors program students also lead parents and students on tours of the academic and residential facilities, which provide an opportunity for candid discussion with students who participate in it.

At the end of the day, the faculty interviewers meet to determine the 25-30 students who will be invited initially. Those not initially invited to join the program but wish to come to Cook regardless are placed on the waiting list. These letters are sent no later than April 15 th, in order to help students decide which college to attend, prior to the May 1 st deadline for most American colleges.

The First-Year Program

Between 22 and 25 first-year students participate in the Cook College General Honors Program. A virtue (or vice) of our program is its size, limited by the funds available to offer merit awards of at least $1000 to each participant. These students take two honors-program courses together first semester: honors Exposition and Argument 103 (3 credits – in lieu of Expository Writing 101, even if students have placed out of that course) and Readings in Biology 111 ( 1 credit), a course in which they learn to analyze and present scientific arguments. Honors program students are not housed together, but get to know one another through these classes and the spring-term Honors Seminar, often electing to share apartments as upperclassmen.

The first semester is “probationary.” Students whose first-term grade-point averages fall below the General Honors Program criterion (3.400 or above – the college’s “Dean’s List”) are either put on honors-program probation or dropped from the program. Approximately 3-5 students at the top of the first-year class are interviewed and invited to join the program in January and take the spring term Honors Seminar.

Transfer Students

Students who transfer into Cook College from another honors program at a Rutgers University college may apply to join the honors program as first-semester sophomores, undertaking the sophomore Honors Tutorials (1 credit each term) and spring Honors Seminar.

The program does not accept students who transfer from outside Rutgers University. However, these students may begin the college’s senior honors thesis program (The George H. Cook Scholars Program – normally undertaken by General Honors Program students) in the second semester of their junior year.

Cook College

There are four undergraduate liberal arts colleges in New Brunswick: Rutgers College (on both sides of the Raritan River), Douglass College (for women, with which Cook shares a campus), Livingston College (on the Piscataway side of the Raritan) and University College (a non-residential evening school for part-time students). There are also several non-residential professional schools – e.g. Mason Gross School of the Arts, the College of Engineering, the College of Pharmacy, the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, the School of Business --, whose students affiliate with one college or another:

Cook is New Brunswick’s only residential professional school, with its own faculty: we offer Bachelor of Science degrees in a specified set of degree programs directly related to the college’s mission and historical status as the land-grant college of New Jersey and the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station. These programs include Animal Science; Plant Science; Environmental Science; Marine Sciences; Nutritional Sciences; Biotechnology; Environmental Policy, Institutions and Behavior; Environmental Planning and Design; Environmental and Business Economics; Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources. Cook College students may also elect to major in other New Brunswick programs related to the college’s land-grant mission (e.g., Biological Sciences; Chemistry; Communication; Geography; Journalism and Mass Media). See the Cook College section of the New Brunswick Undergraduate Catalogue for a complete listing of the college’s degree programs and the requirements of each.

In short, Cook students who decide to major in, for example, history or English or psychology or accounting or physics or mathematics have to transfer to one of the liberal arts colleges in order to earn a degree in those arts-and-sciences fields. However, Cook students may undertake a minor in any minor program of study offered in New Brunswick (see the New Brunswick Undergraduate Catalogue) or complete a double-major in a liberal arts program, in addition to a Cook College degree program.

For further information, do not hesitate to contact the Cook College Honors Programs Office (732-932-9162) or Dr. Timothy Casey (tca@rci.rutgers.edu).

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