Prospective Students

College is a four-year journey of personal transformation, fired by a desire to act ethically, thoughtfully, and effectively in the world. Each year, around 200 outstanding freshmen from across USC’s schools choose to participate in the Thematic Option Honors Program (T.O.). Thematic Option offers a combination of academic rigor, dedicated faculty mentors, co‐curricular activities, and attentive, personalized advising. It’s a serious commitment: to teachers, to fellow students, and to yourself. It requires lots of reading and writing and involves being an active participant in an exciting and vibrant intellectual community — listening to peers, loving language, appreciating the presence of the past, and thinking across disciplinary boundaries to draw connections between literature, history, science, art, philosophy, and politics.

Thematic Option’s curriculum consists of honors-level interdisciplinary courses taught around distinct themes, through which you will satisfy USC’s general education requirements. Your T.O. classes will ask you to consider the big questions, such as:

• Is there such a thing as human nature?
• How have conceptions of justice changed over time?
• Is there order in history?
• How do we define progress?
• What is the nature of truth?
• Where does knowledge come from?

In pursuit of possible answers, you will learn about broad ethical concerns and approaches to historical change. As issues of epistemology, representation, and social construction emerge from your studies, you will be challenged to reconceptualize the world and your role within it.

Thematic Option’s writing program consists of two writing seminars supplemented with biweekly one‐on‐one tutorials. The first-semester writing course focuses on the relationship between critical thinking and analytic writing, while the second-semester course develops your capacity to address specific audiences and convey complex ideas persuasively.

Thematic Option is an engaged and eclectic intellectual community. We are interested in enthusiasm, participation, and the pursuit of more questions rather than simple answers. The typical T.O. student has average high school grades of “A.” More important than grades, applicants to Thematic Option should have an evident love of reading and writing. Many eligible students are contacted by T.O. after they are admitted to the University; however, we encourage all interested students to inquire about and apply for the program. Let us know if you think Thematic Option is right for you.