Honors in the Arts – Past Cohorts

"My favorite part of Honors in the Arts is meeting everyone. The people in the cohort are so different and they have such interesting views on their take of art. Seeing them in their projects and how they want to go about making them is something that's helped me figure out how to do mine. My project is a series of murals that have to do with indigenous peoples and issues within their communities, but specifically Native American. It started off as a project that I would have within the Native Community Center here. As I started off the process I realized it should be a series of paintings, but they're still murals because of the scale. And now I'm projecting them within different areas of Stanford so that it can be more public."

-Lena, Art Practice Major (2015-16 Cohort)

"I learned about the Honors in the Arts program through a student mentor of mine a couple of years back, so I looked into it because I was really interested in doing a capstone project. I feel like it's such an important way to reflect on what I've learned in the past 4 years at Stanford, but I wanted to do it in a way that was meaningful to me. And I just didn't see that happening through a typical thesis. So when I looked into Honors in the Arts I realized that this was exactly how I wanted to end my senior year. I wanted to create something that I could reflect on after my undergraduate career is over and think, this is what made my time meaningful."

- Justine, CSRE Major and Creative Writing Minor (2015-16 Cohort)

"I never really considered myself a writer or poet in high school, but when I came to Admit Weekend at Stanford I went to the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking's open house and saw the Stanford Spoken Word Collective perform. That inspired me to audition freshman year, and I've been performing with the Spoken Word Collective ever since. For my Honors in the Arts project I'm writing spoken word poetry about the child birth experiences of marginalized families. Getting to reach out and meet these moms and learn about their kids and sort of see the ways in which bringing this child into the world has affected their relationship has been really interesting, and lets me reflect on my own relationship with my mom and my family. So there's this research component of doing all these interviews, but it's also very personal for me."

-Greeshma, Human Biology Major (2015-16 Cohort)

"The first year Honors in the Arts started I was living in Kimball, which is the art themed dorm, so there were a lot of flyers everywhere and that's how I learned about the program. I was interested in doing a creative project for my honors thesis mostly because my emphasis in English is Creative Writing. So the summer after my sophomore year I ended up having a Chappell Lougee grant and I did some writing in Singapore. I was trying to compare Asian American experiences to Singaporean ones, specifically mixed race populations in Hawaii, where I'm from, and Singapore. That was a really cool experience directly focusing on writing and doing research that I thought was meaningful. When it came time to apply for Honors in the Arts I had a good idea of what it entailed, and it seemed like there was room for me to talk about an Asian American issue that was related to me in a way that was meaningful. It was nice to have a space for something that was not only creative but also in line with my academic and personal interests."

-Mark, English and Human Biology Major (2015-16 Cohort)

"There aren't many honors programs on campus that let you specifically write creatively. Honors in the Arts let me combine my two interests by letting me study facets of the communication world while still working on my art. It's been an amazing experience to combine those two interests that pretty much defined my college career separately. For my project I'm writing a play that I started while I was abroad in Oxford, and it's set in a hippie commune. It's really exploring what happens when we outgrow identities and how we deal with that. It's looking at queerness and looking at modes of leadership, among other things."

-Julia, Communication major and Theater and Performance Studies minor

"I'm writing a book of prose poems and very short stories that all revolve around the theme of play and games. I study philosophy, and I think the world is pretty strange, and we divide up the world into these concepts pretty arbitrarily. For instance: life. What is life? Which things count as living? I think it's all very strange and arbitrary. So I think poetry is a way to play with those concepts and expand them and sort of dance around them."

-Eric, Philosophy and Religious Studies major

"Here's a program where you'll be with other artists and professional artists, and you'll be meeting once a week and you'll have funding and you'll have events - that's huge... I've loved the feedback I've gotten, it's been really helpful. Everyone's really perceptive, and kind, and caring."

Adam Schorin, American Studies major with a minor in Creative Writing (2016-17 Cohort)

"Because I come in so hypercritical of my work, I'm very hesitant to share it. But then I come out of it feeling a little bit better, which is what I think I need... Being in a supportive group where we're all in it together and everyone has these same self-doubts about their creative process and their work is really reassuring to me."

-Sri Muppidi, Economics major and minor in Creative Writing (2016-17 Cohort)