LSA Honors Program, University of Michigan

This goes out to our first-year students who are moving to campus in just a few weeks!

You may have missed out on submitting to our Honors Summer Reads Instagram Challenges, but we frequently host giveaways via our Instagram. Keep your eyes peeled for future giveaways and you could snag an M Honors tote bag, or bucket hat, or maybe even a Talk Nerdy To Me... t-shirt. Fall semester is only 29 days away

Let us know if you have any other research questions 🤓

Wondering how to best navigate a waitlist? First Year students, we got you!

Calling all incoming Honors first years and transfer students: we’ve still got quite a few courses with plenty of room!

* ​There are NO PRE-REQS for ANY of these courses.
* ​Honors 202 is a 4 credit course that runs the entire semester and knocks out your MSA, BS, QR/1, and JHA Breadth requirements.
* ​We have 3 mini-courses being taught by Honors seniors (Honors 135s), which run from the week of 9/21 - 11/9, and fulfill the JHA Breadth requirement.

We can’t wait to welcome you to campus this fall!

Wishing everyone a Happy 4th of July today!

Today’s Honors Summer Reads in the Wild post comes from rising sophomore, Matty Vogel!

“I enjoy reading in this particular location as it is right on a lake. The water provides a calming presence that allows me to fully immerse myself in ‘I Cheerfully Refuse.’ This picture was taken in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, when I was on vacation with my family. Taking a few moments to read here was one of the highlights of my trip!”

Thank you Matty for sharing such a beautiful reading location with us.

If you’d like to submit an Honors Summer Reads in the Wild post, just snap a picture of your favorite place to read “I Cheerfully Refuse,” write a brief 50 - 100 word caption, and DM it directly to us. We can’t wait to see where everyone is reading this summer!

Call all Honors rising Juniors and rising Seniors!

The LSA Honors and the Sweetland Center for Writing have partnered to develop Honors Thesis Writing Groups for students at ANY stage in their thesis work process: you might still be planning your thesis or still reading or coding data as you gather it; you might be researching, planning, writing, or even editing—or doing several of these at once. 

These groups are led by Sweetland-trained Peer Writing Consultants (PWCs), who are also working on their own theses and will work to assist students in whatever stage they’re at.

The program runs from June 30th, 2026 - August 20th, 2026, and consists of weekly 3-hour sessions in Shapiro 2160. Accepted applicants will receive an orientation training during part of their first meeting day’s HTWG session.

Applications are due by 11:59pm Wednesday, June 24th, 2026! You can find the link in our bio. We look forward to receiving your application soon!

Today we are celebrating Qihao Liang, who was awarded the Marshall Sahlins Social Science Award, one of our ten Goldstein prizes, supported by the generous Goldstein family. Qihao graduated this past spring with an Honors Sociology degree.

Qihao’s thesis, “A Tale of Two Shores: Contested Membership and Educational Migration between Mainland China and Taiwan,” examines how international student migration assumes that crossing borders to study loosens the link among territory, membership, and educational value. Mainland Chinese students in Taiwan move under contested sovereignty, where two states that do not recognize each other govern the same study trajectory. Drawing on 52 interviews and a month of fieldwork in Taiwan, this thesis argues that this configuration runs on a two-key system: two institutionally distinct authorization chains, one held by each state, must turn in synchrony at admission, throughout study, and after graduation. Students enter through dual classification, sustain enrollment through continuous re-authorization, and convert their Taiwan-earned credentials through recognition regimes whose decisions diverge by destination. The inverse case of Taiwanese students in Mainland China shows how state incorporation reorganizes the same bilateral form. Congratulations, Qihao Liang!

Photo by Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.