Edgar Fellows Program

History and Mission

Since its founding nearly 30 years ago, Geneseo’s Edgar Fellows Program has enriched the undergraduate education of a select number of especially dedicated and accomplished students. The program seeks to enhance habits of critical thought and expression—skills equally vital to success in one’s career, one’s private life and one’s participation as a citizen in public life.

Named for its founder and longtime director, William J. Edgar, the Edgar Fellows Program offers specially designed seminar courses, research opportunities, close collaboration with program advisers and rich co-curricular activities.

Geneseo sign

Sturges Hall

Dante House

All new students who join Geneseo as an Edgar Fellow are housed in Dante House, one of Geneseo’s Residential College Houses. Students assigned to Dante House are guaranteed not to live in a triple room. Programming within Dante House focuses on global service and citizenship. For more information, visit the Dante House page.

The Capstone Experience

The culminating experience for Edgar Fellows is the year-long Capstone Project. It may be a traditional honors thesis, but it can also be a project of the student’s own design—artistic, experimental, service. Students work throughout the year with a faculty mentor of the student’s choosing.

Recent Capstone Experiences:

  • Modeling HPC Vaccination
  • Hearing Saul through David
  • Global Mamas: Gender Empowerment in Ghana
  • Materiality in Accounting
  • Yemen: Power, Discourse, and War
  • Women in Jazz

Trading room

Students in bio lab

Student Outcomes

(Over the most recent five-year period.)

Phi Beta Kappa

Approximately 67% of Edgar Fellows have been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, America’s oldest and most widely recognized collegiate honor society. Fewer than ten percent of America’s colleges and universities have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Average GPA

The average GPA of students in the Edgar Fellows Program is 3.77.

Graduation Honors

Summa Cum Laude: 70%
Magna Cum Laude: 21.8%
Cum Laude: 15.3%
Total Edgar Fellows graduating with honors: 93.5%