Greetings, I'm Dr. Paul Criss and I have the privilege of overseeing the Baptist Health Sciences University Honors Program. We have unique honors philosophy here because our program is designed to enhance and enrich the experiences of talented, highly motivated students like you, while you're with us at Baptist University. We provide a distinctive learning environment that facilitates higher levels of scholarship and community engagement.
Our goal is to provide a purposeful community, sharing opportunities leading to academic success. We want to build scholars. You don't have to have already arrived, but we want to help you get there. We do this through a holistic development program that we call the four pillars. We have the scholarly research and advancement, professional and spiritual enrichment, cultural and social engagement, and service and leadership development. Now if that sounds interesting to you, you're probably wondering, Well, how do I get in?
Well, freshmen need to have a 3.5 GPA and a minimum 25 ACT score. Transfer students need a 3.5 post-secondary GPA, and at least two general education requirements remaining. You stay in the program by maintaining that 3.0 GPA. Getting through unique experience, we start with a gateway course called Honors Baptist University experience, where you learn advanced leadership principles and all about the culture of Baptist University, and some resources that will help you succeed. Then we want you to receive honors designation for several courses.
For example, you can take honors-only courses, or you can honorize your general education and programmatic courses that you're already assigned to take. That culminates in the Honors Capstone experience. It includes a research component, a written component, and then a presentation component, where you present before the entire college community prior to graduation. What's nice is there's no additional coursework needed, rather, you're just diving deeper into the courses you're already required to take in your program. You emerge with about 15 hours with that honors designation. Now, we have great expectations for honor students.
So if you're interested in consuming knowledge and creating new knowledge or becoming a leader on campus, we want you to be a part of this program, to whom much is given much as expected. So to help you do what we expect, we offer a few benefits so you can excel academically. So the benefits of the honors program are available to you to help you accomplish these great expectations. We want you to have collaboration between honor students and faculty, distinctive learning opportunities. We host a monthly honors colloquium, where we get together to talk about leadership principles, and productivity ideas so that you can be successful in what you're doing.
We provide service opportunities like our current toy drive to benefit the pediatric patients at Baptist Children's Hospital. We have an honors floor in our campus residence hall. And we have social development activities such as an honors lounge to meet in and study in activities, and other gatherings. We provide spiritual development opportunities they have bound. What we just did, an honors chapel, led by our honor students, a couple weeks ago was a glorious moment. We have leadership development opportunities to help you serve on the campus and in the community. You can serve in the campus leadership of the honors student leadership council or other campus organizations. We have behind-the-scenes Baptist facility tours for our honor students you can see behind the curtain, it's amazing.
We recently did one in DeSoto, where we had the students learn about the respiratory care department as well as the sleep study department. Lots of neat stuff happening there. We have priority registration each trimester so that you can get the classes you need. For recognizing you, we have an Honors Program, induction ceremony, and we provide you with honors designation on the final transcript, designating each course as honorized. And we also have your capstone experience title documented. You're not only recognized at commencement, but we also have a pre-commencement honors medallion and award ceremony.
I really believe that the honors distinction can set you apart from others as you look for your dream job and begin your career in health sciences. So if you're interested for more information, please contact me at 901-572-2525 or Paul.Criss@baptistu.edu. We're excited about you coming to Baptist University. We want to be a part of the honors program, and we look forward to seeing you soon.