Schreyer Honors College
Overview
Pennsylvania State University’s Schreyer Honors College was founded in 1997 to create the next generation of leaders to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. Schreyer is widely recognized as one of the most selective undergraduate honors programs in the United States. The Honors College student mission promotes academic excellence with integrity, building a global perspective and creating opportunities for leadership and civic engagement. The Smeal College of Business helps to support this mission by offering a top-ranked undergraduate program with opportunities to get involved, study abroad, and connect with leading faculty and the world's top companies.
Less than 1% of all students admitted to Penn State are selected for admission to the Schreyer Honors College, and of this population, less than 1% are selected for Honors designation by the Finance Department at Smeal. Each year the Finance Department graduates between 20-25 scholars. The finance department graduates the largest cohort of Schreyer Scholars within Smeal each year and is second only to the Mechanical Engineering Department across all of Penn State.
All Smeal scholars work closely with a specially trained Smeal honors adviser to help them formulate an academic plan that incorporates their learning goals and objectives, including fulfilling honors requirements, major selection, minors and study abroad opportunities. Professor Brian S. Davis has served as the honors advisor for the Finance Department since 2014. Finance Scholars are required to complete at least 12 credits of specifically designated finance honors courses.
Honors Education and Pedagogy
The purpose of an honors course is to show students how knowledge in the field is discovered, developed, evaluated, argued, tested, compared, and applied. Class size is limited to 25 students in the Finance Department. Honors students learn what research looks like in the field of finance and understand the scholarship behind the discipline’s core principles. Honors courses often are multidisciplinary and may also emphasize internationalization or diversity. Typically reading of more depth than ordinary is required, along with original interpretation, writing and research. Honors courses emphasize reading primary source material and the analysis of real economic and financial data. Students are asked to confront these sources in discussion, writing and analysis.
Senior Year Honors Thesis
As part of the requirements for graduation as a Finance Honors Scholar, students must complete a research thesis under the direct supervision of the Finance Department honors advisor and another Penn State faculty member by the end of their senior year. A list of 2023-24 graduates, thesis topics and their advisors can be found below.
The Schreyer Honors College states that the goal of the undergraduate honors thesis is to “demonstrate a command of relevant scholastic work and to make a personal contribution to that scholarship.” In addition, the Finance Department requires students to complete a comprehensive literature review of their chosen thesis topic as well as some form of analytical research investigating or testing an original research question.
A small selection of the topics selected by the 2024-25 cohort of Finance Scholars include:
- the preparation of a fintech payment system business plan start-up company in Latin America
- analyses of the effectiveness of Dodd-Frank banking regulation and the Consumer Finance Protection Board
- acquisition premium trends in the healthcare industry
- the use and abuse of leverage in financing recent unicorn IPOs
- an investigation of the feasibility of NBA expansion strategies in India