A small, intimate learning community tucked inside of a big, exciting campus. This is where you'll meet limitless opportunities, realize your potential, and maybe even uncover your purpose.
Near the heart of campus and right off the quad is an iconic building with Palladian windows and classical detail.
Seventy years ago, Chapman Hall was the university bookstore, but today it is the home of Clark Honors College, a community of curious, creative, and committed students and professors. In the CHC, students don’t just take courses; they have life-shaping intellectual experiences. They don’t just complete assignments; they explore passions and stretch the limits of their imagination. Here, people know your name, remember sitting next to you during a lecture from a visiting CHC alum, recall the brilliant insight you shared in a seminar, and discuss ideas with you over lunch.
Our students can major in anything—business, art, journalism, biology—which makes our classes diverse and conjures a variety of viewpoints in every discussion. They teach and learn from one another. They are ballet dancers, football players, and actors; they are neuroscience interns, playwrights, and entrepreneurs. Our professors are mentors, advisors, and guides, empowering students to navigate an intellectually vibrant landscape.
Our students strive, then they achieve. They set magical goals, then turn them into reality.
Chapman Hall hums with creativity, collaboration, and the unexpected. It is the place where what you think you can do becomes what you’ve just experienced.
It’s where you become you.
Our Students » Our Faculty » Our Alumni » Your Thesis » Calderwood Seminar »
Meet Our Students
Meet our students who have accomplished fantastic things in only four years’ time.
The first football player to graduate from the CHC and has proven to be an example for other football players and athletes to follow. The ballet dancer who turned down spots at the San Francisco and Houston Ballet companies to attend CHC and join the Eugene Ballet in order to study biology. The Goldwater scholar who is conducting revealing research on immunology and was awarded one of the first Knight Campus fellowships to continue her study.
The student who considers Eugene home, and is already interviewing at medical so she can return to Cameroon, the country of her birth, to provide health care to those in need, like her mother, a doctor, does. And the international student who traveled from Chile to Eugene, dove into the “rabbit hole of neuroscience” and emerged with one of the most prized medical internships in the state.
Meet Our Faculty
The foundation of CHC is undoubtedly our faculty, nationally and world-wide winning scholars who are recognized and renown in their respective field.
Meet Mark Carey, who spends every summer measuring glacial melt and revealing its warnings for the environment. There’s Melissa Graboyes who was awarded a substantial NHA fellowship for her work on malaria in Africa, and Daphne Gallagher, a recipient of a Mellon Grant, is leading a revolutionary digitization project with JMSA and UO libraries.
Meet Our Alumni
They may leave the Chapman Hall nest, but sooner or later, they always come back to mentor the next generation of CHC students, guide them through complicated processes such as applying for distinguished scholarships, or impart hard-earned life wisdom.
There’s a Tony-winning and Oscar-nominated play and screenwriter Jeff Whitty, who soared to national acclaim with his groundbreaking musical, “Avenue Q;” Francesca Fontana, a recent graduate who had the talent and timing to turn her Wall Street Journal internship into a full-time career; and Jason Lewis-Berry, once an independent film maker who turned his life into providing international humanitarian aid in conflict zones and war-torn areas including Central Africa and Afghanistan.
Proud doesn’t begin to describe how we feel about our alumni; typically, we’re just in awe.
Your Thesis. Your choice.
The Clark Honors College thesis is a part of the curriculum where you take charge, harness your interests and explore a path you’ve never had the chance to travel on before.
For your first two years, you’ll explore your major, actively look for questions and ideas that you would like to investigate further, and choose courses or lab internships with professors who are experts in those topics.
Challenge yourself, satisfy your curiosity, discover the answers. The opportunity to study something you love doesn’t come along very often. Submerse yourself in learning and be amazed at what your reearch reveals.
The opportunities of where your thesis will lead you are infinite. Choose where you want to explore.
Recent Clark Honors College Theses
- Intestinal Phenotypes of Zebrafish Enteric Nervous System Double Mutants
- Best Practices for Attributing Climate Change to Extreme Weather Events in Media
- Reframing the Gaze: How Women Filmmakers Influence the Portrayal of Women On-Screen
- On Both Sides: A Linguistic Analysis Between Black Lives Matter and National Socialist Movement
- Reflecting a Queer Reality: Understanding Bisexual and Transgender Responses to Mainstream LGBT Advertisements
Calderwood Seminars come to Clark Honors College.
The intensive classes teach students how to talk and write about their complex research in a way that is accessible, understandable, and appeals to broad audiences.
The seminars, started in 2013 at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and expanding to Ivy League and hand-picked public universities, also focus heavily on learning how to give and receive peer-reviewed critique.
