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 embark by participating in the Thematic Option Honors Program (T.O.), USC’s general education alternative. 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.