Honda-Ohio State STEM Award

More than 100 members of the Class of 2023 received the final awarding of the Honda-Ohio State Stem award. Introduced to Ohio high schools in 2017 to recognize superior STEM scholarship and increase interest in STEM careers, the award is being discontinued after 18 years. However, the Honda Scholarship will continue to be offered to freshman STEM applicants at The Ohio State University.

Award notification letters sent to high school nominators last fall explained the sunsetting of the award, which started in 2005 as the Honda-Ohio State Math Medal award (2005-2016). The STEM award was expanded to include outstanding academic performance in science, technology, business and engineering areas in addition to the original focus on mathematics.

Beginning with the Class of 2024, high school students interested in attending Ohio State University to pursue a STEM major can apply for a $3,000 annual scholarship. Twenty scholarships are available in engineering and 10 new scholarships were added in 2018 for STEM majors in business and arts and sciences. The Honda scholarship can be combined with other scholarships at OSU.

The inaugural class of 2018 STEM award recipients consisted of 178 high school seniors in central and southwestern Ohio, while the class of 2019 award honored 150 graduating seniors. One hundred nine seniors were nominated for the award from the class of 2020, 137 received the Stem award in 2021 and 115 were recognized in the Class of 2022.

More than 300 public and private high schools in central, western and southwestern Ohio were invited each spring to select an incoming senior to receive the STEM Award. The seniors were notified of their award in September and invited to continue their STEM career pathway by applying for the Honda scholarship at Ohio State.

Math Medal History

The Honda-Ohio State Math Medal was created in 2005 to recognize outstanding math scholarship in Ohio high schools and encourage talented math scholars to pursue their higher education at The Ohio State University’s College of Engineering and their future employment goals at Honda.

Between 2005 and 2016, 2,285 high school seniors received the Honda Math Medal. For the first five years, the Math Medal was awarded only to high schools in the 15 counties surrounding Honda, but was expanded to 16 southwestern Ohio counties in 2010.

Nearly 600 Math Medal recipients in the 13 senior classes honored applied for Honda scholarships in the College of Engineering. Eleven classes of Math Medal recipients/Honda scholars have graduated from Ohio State.