Honours Programme

In order to kick-off the programme with an adventure, you will join on a 5-day trip to Texel. Through teambuilding activities with your peers you'll get to know each other better. The kick-off of your Honours Impact Project starts here on Texel where your coach will visit you for a first brainstorming day. This is a mandatory event for all honours students.

Take on extra assignments in your own field of study or interest. For instance, you can approach a professor and agree upon a topic/assignment to carry out. It can be on any subject or methodology in which you have an interest to develop a deeper understanding.

In a weekend activity you will familiarise yourself with some theoretical frameworks on leadership; then you find a leader in the field of your interest and spend time learning from them.

Learn from each other, dare to make mistakes, and receive feedback that reaches far beyond the classroom. With professional staff support, we will make a collective effort to shape a safe environment where you and your peers can share your reflections and ambitions.

Being in the Honours Programme means being a part of a community. On a voluntary basis, you have the freedom to design and participate in activities with your peers. Here you can contribute to and embrace a diversity of perspectives.

In year 2 & 3 you embark on the Honours Impact Projects to produce a self-defined product in interdisciplinary teams. The project theme is proposed by a WUR professor and is related to WUR's mission.

To start the programme adventurously, you will go on a weekend trip to Friesland. Through team building activities with your peers you get to know each other better. This is where the kick-off of your Honours Impact Project begins and where you work on a collective assignment. This is a mandatory event for all honours students.

Who am I and how do I want to contribute to the world in a good way? Art of Living is about the question: how do I want to live, what are my values and what inspires me? As student in the here and now, as professional in the future and also as citizen in this world. In the Honours programme we stimulate you to think about your personal learning question (s) and development. We do this together in groups and individual.

Knowing yourself and reflecting on your inner thoughts and feelings but also on daily life helps to make better decisions and to gain more insight in your own actions, communication and relationships with others. By exchanging experiences with fellow students, you learn to investigate and formulate your own motives, to help each other and you learn from the stories of others.

Art of living is a compulsory track with meetings, workshops and InterVision groups during the Honours year.

In the honours programme there is room for the students’ own input and that certainly applies to the leadership lab. The leadership lab is a monthly meeting with all students to explore the theme of leadership in a broad context. Each meeting is organised by a small group of students for the whole group. The what and the how is free as long it has a link with leadership. It is challenging and motivates to create your own lesson.

The whole student group sees each other every month at the leadership lab next to the smaller HIP and the Art of Living groups. This means there can be build a strong community which makes it possible to experiment and challenge yourself in a safe environment. The international and multidisciplinary composition of the group is an interesting experience to cross boundaries.

If you are curious about what an Honours Impact Project consists of, you will find that no two projects look alike. Working in interdisciplinary groups, you are able to tailor your project to any range of topics and methods that spark your collective interest.

It is the perfect opportunity to bring your knowledge, passions and skills to the table and working on an interdisciplinary research project (HIP), which fits within the life sciences investment & research themes from WUR and is supervised by scientists from both Wageningen University and Wageningen Research. This gives you the unique opportunity to look behind the scenes of the research that takes place at our university and research institutes, and to contribute to it.

The Strategic Agenda 2022-2025 of Wageningen University states: “our ambition is to increase our contribution to finding and realising solutions for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations within the Wageningen domain: contributing to ending hunger, ensuring food security and sustainable agriculture, climate change mitigation, protection of biodiversity and sustainable use of ecosystems on land and at sea.”

Together we define issues that we want to explore. To this end, we invite guest speakers, organise excursions and collaborate with relevant experts and societal organisations to contribute to the goals of the Sustainable Development Goals.