How Honors Students Study and Live at A&M: Learn About LAUNCH

With the deadline now extended, Fall 2021 Aggie freshmen have till Jan. 4 to apply for the University Honors Program, part of LAUNCH, which has received over $167,000 in support since 2017 from The Association of Former Students.

Learn about A&M's honors programs and LAUNCH in this story from the March-April 2020 Texas Aggie magazine!

LAUNCH Augments Aggies’ Education
Director Led Modern Evolution Of A&M Honors Programming

By Sue Owen '94
Since 2015, Texas A&M’s University Honors and several related programs have operated as a unit under the name LAUNCH.
LAUNCH — which gets some 10% to 20% of its programming budget from Association donors — served about 7,600 A&M students last year, including 1,700 incoming freshmen.
The current unit grew from a 2010 merger between Honors and Undergraduate Research.
“We completely rethought the Honors program,” said Dr. Sumana Datta, LAUNCH’s executive director.
From there, the program kept picking up services and responsibilities.
“In 2015, we got the L,” Datta said with a laugh. That was for Learning Communities.

Here’s how LAUNCH breaks down:
Learning Communities
There are many of these across A&M, and LAUNCH operates six — five for the recipients of specific scholarships and one for students living in Honors housing (Lechner and McFadden residence halls). Generally, LCs are “families” of students with peer and/or faculty mentors; they may take part in activities or classes together, and research indicates these experiences improve student success.
Academic Excellence
LAUNCH coordinates a wide range of student and faculty awards. In 2015, LAUNCH took over coordination of A&M’s two top student honors, the Brown-Rudder and Gates-Muller awards. This year, it will announce the first Class of ’80 E. King Gill Award for Selfless Service. In 2019, it partnered with Phi Kappa Phi in updating The Association’s Gathright Scholar Awards to better recognize top juniors, sophomores and freshmen.
Undergraduate Research
This part of LAUNCH offers services to some 1,800 students per year, including the capstone program that confers an Honors Fellow distinction; workshops; a volunteer program in which students speak with visitors, students, parents and faculty; and the student-run Explorations journal that publishes A&M’s best undergraduate research.
National Fellowships
LAUNCH helps students from across A&M in the application process for becoming a Rhodes Scholar, Churchill Scholar or similar distinguished fellowships. “If you want to go on a Fulbright, if you want to get one of the prestigious fellowships to study in England, you come to us,” Datta said.
Capstones
Any A&M student with a grade point average of 3.0 or better can apply to carry out a yearlong capstone project with a faculty or expert mentor. These culminate in a mini-thesis or other scholarly product, often presented at Student Research Week or the Undergraduate Research Scholars Symposium.
Honors
Students apply to University Honors during admission as incoming fish or in their sophomore year. They take part in specific opportunities and events, and if accepted as freshmen, they live in an Honors dorm their first year. College or Department Honors students can enroll in more than 300 Honors classes, open to all who meet the academic requirements.

Honors programming has existed at Texas A&M for more than 50 years. But between 2010 and 2015, the program changed significantly.
Before 2010, Honors at A&M was “very course-based,” Datta said — you enrolled in Honors classes, and you might live in Honors housing.
But A&M had grown into a major research university — classified as a Tier One research institution by the Carnegie Foundation and in 2001 being invited to join the prestigious Association of American Universities.
“The Honors program didn’t match the institution we had become,” said Datta, who is also A&M’s assistant provost for undergraduate studies.
In 2010, when she was A&M’s assistant dean for undergraduate research, she took over the Honors program as well when the two merged.
Former Aggie Honors students got the chance to weigh in, as Datta’s new unit surveyed them to ask what had been most effective. Their answers, she said, were: living in Honors housing, doing undergraduate research and taking small classes where they had a relationship with the professor.
“They were telling us exactly what the research literature out there tells us about student success,” Datta said.
So in fall 2012, A&M launched a revamped University Honors program.
Rather than being classified as Honors students because of standardized test scores or high school rankings, students now apply by writing two short essays. What Datta’s unit looks for in those essays, she said, is the willingness to take a risk and push themselves, creativity and self-knowledge.
During students’ first year living in Lechner or McFadden (about 200 in each dorm), volunteer sophomore advisers (“SAs”) help them adjust to college. Students must earn 30 “Honors points” by taking classes or participating in activities (choosing from 10 to 20 events per semester organized by the Honors Student Council).
To get the Honors Fellows distinction at graduation, they must complete a yearlong capstone project.
The changes and expansions serve students in many ways, but the most noticeable may be a change in how the students work.
“What I see is students who are much better able to pull together information that they’ve gathered in different classes into a coherent whole,” Datta said. “And they’re more flexible.”

Your funding to LAUNCH
As a donor to The Association, your gifts each year help provide 10% to 20% of LAUNCH’s programming budget. “It’s what allows us to do all of this,” said LAUNCH’s executive director, Dr. Sumana Datta. Association support to LAUNCH in recent fiscal years: 2020: $46,000; 2019: $36,000; 2018: $48,500; 2017: $37,000.

The Association of Former Students has a bold vision to engage 100,000 donors annually for Texas A&M by the end of 2020. To learn more, visit tx.ag/100Kby2020. To help us help more Aggies, make a gift at tx.ag/Give.