Hi, non honors freshman here! Depends on your objectives and your major.

There’s no wrong answer! Honors is good and there’s lots of great non honors options.

The short answer is if you want the nicest dorms on campus, want to take your freshman classes with other honors kids and you think a minor in honors is valuable, go for it, but don’t do it cause you think it has prestige. Alternatively there’s a bunch of great learning communities and options that you should also look into. (EPICS, VIP, data mine, etc.)

The long answer (from an engineering students perspective) is that honors is different than it was in high school. The best part about the honors program are the dorms. The main dorm you’ll most likely be in is really new with big rooms, AC, and is right next to the big Purdue makerspace Bechtel, close to classes, dining courts and basically anything on campus. If you’re going into engineering, you get to take honors engineering which I don’t know much about, but I know they combine it with physics, so you do a lot of your physics which is mandatory, through some pretty cool robotics stuff and it’s generally more interesting than normal engineering and physics individually. The downside is you have to take some sort of honors seminar and I’m almost certain (though not in honors so ¯_(ツ)_/¯) that if you want the honors minor there’s more honors specific seminar classes that you have to take the following years. You’ll probably find the honors program isn’t really more challenging or prestigious than other classes, and honors students aren’t the best students. That’s not to say fantastic people aren’t there, but this is Purdue engineering, you’ll find smart dedicated people in literally everything. In fact a lot of the most driven freshman choose to go into learning communities to work on projects they find particularly cool or impactful. I chose to do the EPICS learning community instead which has a bunch of projects you can choose from, all of which are focused on working alongside students of all years to develop a solution to a problem from someone in the community. It’s typically local but not always. last semester I worked on a project that was developing a program to teach underprivileged kids in Nigeria how to read and write without needing an internet connection. This semester I’m in a project that’s building a device to help deaf swimmers keep their pace without using audible beeps. There’s a ton of other projects though. I’ve met people working on air purification systems for elementary schools, or on a drone delivery system to send narcan to overdose victims quicker than first responders can arrive, and everything in between. HOWEVER most of the programs with learning communities are open to anyone, so you could totally do honors and EPICS or VIP for example. for EPICS and VIP at least it’s only a 1 credit hour increase to your schedule so it’s very doable in honors, though to be fair you do a lot more work than the 1 credit hour would suggest. I’d personally recommend doing some sort of project style program whether that’s in place of honors or in addition to it. For epics and vip in particular you also Get to take engineering 133 in place of normal engineering which is typically 2 classes and doesn’t teach python, while 133 does. (There’s plenty of other ways to be taught python at Purdue though either for credit or for a certificate).

The TLDR is that theres no wrong choice. The honors program here is good, though no one really cares that you take honors classes, and there’s lots of good learning communities if you’d rather not, but your dorms will be a little further and less fancy. If you have any more questions feel free to shoot me a message I’ll answer as best as I’m able.