Once entering the labour market, the majority of our graduates will have to work in an interdisciplinary context, whether it will be in academia or otherwise. Even more important, expectations are that your generation will be faced with unprecedented complex (global) challenges, such as energy use, health care, safety and security and climate change. Challenges that require an interdisciplinary approach and the involvement of multiple parties in order to be solved or at least dealt with. These complex issues are typified by conflicting values, mounting political pressure, and major economic interests.

In Honours+, we aim at offering our students a first learning experience to approach/tackle such (global) challenges in an interdisciplinary setting, under the professional guidance by staff members from Maastricht University, the so-called Supervisor.
The challenges you and the students will be working on are based upon and linked to the Dutch National Research Agenda, and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and therefore also in line with UM’s core strategic programme.

An overview of the available challenges can be found on our website, and we can assign 2-3 teams/Supervisors per challenge (multiple teams will be working on the same topic).

A true Honours+ challenge:

• Is a challenging, academic and current case, issue or problem, with societal relevance;
• Is linked to UN’s SDG’s and the Dutch National Research Agenda;
• Pushes students outside their comfort zone;
• Calls for an innovative solution, exploration or approach;
• Allows and facilitates an interdisciplinary approach, with an equal input of the involved disciplines;
• Requires a time investment of 125 hours per student;
• Can be approached along the lines of the scientific method;
• Either calls for a solution (applied research), or aims to advance knowledge on the phenomenon (theoretical research).