The Honors Program provides opportunities for interaction among Honors students of different class ranks, thereby contributing to the formation of an intellectual community among students in the program. It meets regularly during the academic year for social interaction, discussion and occasional special speakers and field trips. The current co-presidents of Honors students are Cameron Wilkens and Catherine Wood, and activities during the 2006 and 2007 academic years included:

The weekend before school began, the Honors students spent three days at nearby camp Michindoh to relax, to plan for the year and to discuss Rodney Stark's book, The Victory of Reason. Joining us for the weekend to direct our discussions were Dr. Mark Steckbeck and Dr. Don Turner.

One afternoon each week throughout the year, the Honors students host a reading and discussion group focusing on the works being read in the freshman Honors English and History classes—The Bible, Antigone, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli and many others. The professors of the English Honors class and the Honors History section join us on occasion, as do professors from Philosophy, French, History, English, Biology and other disciplines as we wrestle with the great works of the western tradition.

Once a month on Sunday evening, the Honors Students gather with their trays from the cafeteria in a conference room for dinner discussion with invited faculty members. We have enjoyed discussions on cosmogony and scientific method with a member of the physics faculty, southern agrarian literature with an English professor, the biology of nutrition with a professor from the Chemistry department, the linguistics of translation into languages without alphabets with an alumna who has worked with a remote tribe in the upper Amazon for the past two decades, and one student-led discussion even introduced us to the genre of zombie movies!

The first Friday of every month the Honors students host dinners for their peers and members of the faculty and community. Each month, a different group of 4–6 students select the location, plan and prepare the meal, and invite guests to join us. Dinners throughout the year include formal meals, international themes and spaghetti nights at a variety of locations on and off campus. Each meal also features a member of the faculty or a community leader speaking on a topic of special interest—presentations have included the Bible as literature, reflections on the Holocaust, qualities of a leader, Poe's "The Raven" and a discussion of Agape Love.

Throughout the year, the Honors students take trips to nearby cities: a Saturday of browsing the used bookstores in Ann Arbor; a weekend trip to Chicago to explore museums and cultural institutions; an evening trip to the Toledo Symphony. At various times throughout the year, we attend lectures by prominent authorities in a variety of fields and attend some of the finest musical and theatrical performances in the Midwest.

Tuesday and Thursday afternoons during the school year, a dozen Honors students spend an hour in local elementary school classrooms, helping tutor the students in math and reading, and getting to know the community. It's great fun, and the kids have come to love the college students. Other Honors Program volunteer activities over the past years have included working at a Chicago homeless shelter, adopting a local stretch of highway and shovelling snow from the sidewalks of elderly neighbors.

Twenty-five Honors students spent Spring Break 2007 in Boston to soak up the national and historical significance of that rich city. During the 2006 College Spring Break, a group of 30 Honors students traveled to Philadelphia to explore the historical and cultural legacy of that famous city. Forty students travelled through Toronto to Montreal and Quebec City on Spring Break of 2005. And Spring Break 2004 brought 40 students to Washington DC for a week of exploration, including congressionally arranged tours of the Pentagon and the White House and a special tour of the Supreme Court with Hillsdale alumnus, Aaron Streett, who served in 2003-04 as law clerk to the Chief Justice.

In the summers of 2001 to 2003, the seniors in the Honors Program travelled for a month to Europe. While there, they toured castles and amphitheaters, fortresses and Greek ruins, palaces and concert halls - a host of historic sites from Roman, Medieval, Early Modern and Modern history. They also read daily and discussed great works of West, including George Orwell's Homage to Catalunya. In addition, they participated in local cultural festivals, sampled a variety of cuisines, and explored the biology and botany of mountains, river valleys, beaches, and high plains. Since 2004, the rising senior class in the program has traveled to Anatolia (modern Turkey), melting pot in hellenistic times of the middle-eastern traditions of Judaism and Christianity and the western traditions of Greece and Rome, melting pot in contemporary times of those same traditions with Islam. They have seen ancient sites from Troy to Cappadocia to Haran and the Hittite capital at Bogazkale, and of course the cities of Paul's travels and the seven churches of the Apocalypse.

Naturally, wherever a creative group of students like this gets together, there will always be opportunities for fun and socializing: birthday parties, halloween costume parties and cookouts.