Students
Eligibility
To qualify for Phi Beta Kappa membership, students must be juniors or seniors pursuing a B.A. or B.S. degree in any of the departments or programs in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences; in the Economics (Liberal Arts Concentration) major in the Belk College of Business; or Bachelor’s degrees in the departments of Music, Dance, Theater, or Art & Art History in the College of Arts + Architecture.
Juniors must have a UNC Charlotte GPA of at least 3.9, and seniors a GPA of at least 3.85.
Eligible students must have taken coursework in mathematics and have demonstrated at least intermediate level proficiency in a second language. At least three quarters of their college credits must be in the liberal arts and sciences, demonstrating their curiosity, intellectual range, and scholarly accomplishment. Transfer students must have completed at least three full semesters at UNC Charlotte and be fully registered for a fourth at the time of nomination.
For further information see the Society’s Stipulations for Membership.
Selection Process
A UNC Charlotte faculty Committee on Members in Course takes nominations of students from faculty, department chairs, and academic advisors. The Committee also examines student transcripts to develop its list of potential members.
FAQs
Q: I recently received an email inviting me to join Phi Beta Kappa. What exactly is this Greek thing about? I think this is the 16th or 17th email I’ve received on this topic — though they might have been different organizations as all Greek letters sound pretty much the same to me. Most of them sounded like spam…Is this organization not just another resume padder looking for money from students?
A: No. Phi Beta Kappa is this country’s first and oldest academic honor society. In its 246 years of existence it has stood for the highest standard of academic excellence, for freedom of thought, and for the lasting value of the sciences and the humanities. That’s why students at Yale and Chapel Hill, at Duke and Stanford, at Wake Forest and Princeton, are eager to be nominated by their faculty for this honor.
Top students from every field in the arts and sciences, from poet Amanda Gorman to legendary football star Peyton Manning, from composer Stephen Sondheim to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and John Roberts, to artists, activists, and intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, and Gloria Steinem, along with other leaders in every field from literature to politics to science — including 140 winners of the Nobel Prize — have been honored with membership in Phi Beta Kappa.
So have more than sixty of your own faculty here at UNC Charlotte. Leaders in their own fields of study, they have chosen you to join them in an organization that represents the best in American scholarlship.
So now is your chance.
“If you could only join one Honor Society,” Dr. Diane Zablotsky, Director of UNC Charlotte’s prestigious Levine Scholars Program, has told her own students, “it should be Phi Beta Kappa. It’s the most prestigious one, and membership is something that stays on your resume during your whole career.” Dr. Malin Pereira, Dean of UNC Charlotte’s Honors College, has encouraged her students to do the same.