Greetings:  We are celebrating the beginning of our second year in our new office space in 150 Richards Hall.   The space has turned out to be amazing – and we have been able to host lots of events here including our first senior dinner for those students graduating last January.  The space is beautiful – bright, spacious and with tons of “bells and whistles” including some pretty fancy technology assets.  But our biggest asset within the new space is the addition of two new Academic Advisors – Justin Silvestri joined us in October 2011 and Katie Merrill just joined us in August.  They join Colleen Cronin, of our advising staff, who is beginning her third year with us in Honors.  So come on in with your advising concerns – we can more than meet your needs!

I want to thank many upper-class students for their efforts during Welcome Week 2012.  Thanks go out to our almost 200 volunteers – you all helped once again to make the first week on campus an exciting and rewarding one for our entering students.  The highlight of the program was the terrific interdisciplinary panel – Professors Parekh (Philosophy), Coley (Psychology), and Smith (Biology) who led a discussion of our First Pages selection by Ann Patchett, State of Wonder.   After Patchett met with rousing enthusiasm here on campus, she wrote us to say, “I’ve never met such funny, bright, smart and charming kids…”  Kudos to you all for making such a terrific impression!

The spring classes were terrific.  We heard lots of great comments from the faculty who were so pleased with efforts made by you in their classes.  This fall we are joined by three new faculty.  Professors Walker (History) and Hill (Earth and Environmental Sciences) are teaching in the First Year Inquiry Series.  Professor Ross (Journalism) joins us in the Honors Interdisciplinary Seminar Series.  Between the three them, we have the world covered from the continent of Latin America (Walker) to the volcanos of Iceland (Hill), and the devastation of Hiroshima and the slums of Mumbai (Ross).

Updates from our Faculty in Residence (FiR) at International Village include the birth of Professor Rifat Sipahi’ s son and his recent tenure in Engineering and the arrival of a second member of the FiR team, Professor Mindelyn Buford from the Department of Sociology.  Both professors joined us during Welcome Week and will be hosting wonderful opportunities in INV.

Fall always is a bit of a challenge because we see the start of many prospective students visiting campus.  We are always grateful to the many of you who are willing to help us out answering questions from prospective students and their parents.   And of course, we also extend our thanks to those of you who have going through Mentor-training and our working with me in the Enhancing Honors course this fall with all our first year students.

This upcoming November, our national organization – the National Collegiate Honors Council – will be holding its annual conference in Boston.  Several of our students will be presenting at the Student Poster Session, and others will be helping to moderate panels at the meetings.  We will keep you posted as plans for that conference emerge.

We have 22 students who joined us in Italy this past summer on our Rome Dialogue of Civilization under the tutelage of Professor Gordana Rabrenovic.  We think this might have been the strongest Dialogue yet, as we begin to build lasting ties with our collaborators in Rome.  Professor Rabrenovic added Rome to her itinerary after leading Dialogues to Belfast Ireland, the Balkans, and Israel.

We are all looking forward to working with you this fall.  Our new Administrative Assistant, Dan Guarracino, will be the first person many of you will meet with when you come through our door.  He comes by honors education honestly; he graduated from Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.  Come by and meet Justin, Katie and Dan if you have not met them yet.

As always, Senior Associate Directors Lauren Pouchak and Sheryl Mayuski are also available to assist.  Sheryl is especially helpful for those of you considering a Junior-Senior Project and Lauren will be working closely with all the volunteers for First Pages and our new E-portfolios initiative.  Our terrific graduate assistants Elizabeth Jacoby and Ben Nevus will be working to help our seniors through their exit interviews among other activities.

As always, our regular programming such as Pizza and Profs, ticketed events, leadership training, and fellowships advising continues chugging along so watch the weekly notices carefully for schedules.

All and all, we are looking forward to a great semester – hope to see you at our 150 Richards Hall – the student lounge is terrific.  Let us know if there is anything else we can do – stop by, the door is open.

Professor Maureen Kelleher

Director, University Honors Program

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Greetings:  Since the last issue of the Honors Perspective, we have moved to our new office space in 150 Richards Hall.  The space is beautiful – bright, spacious and with tons of “bells and whistles” including some pretty fancy technology assets.  We celebrated the new space in a number of ways during the fall, including an Open House in October when we had about 400 guests come through one afternoon, our pre-finals study break with donuts and cider for everyone, and a special “graduation dinner” for our January grads.  Next time I’ll remember to order champagne although it was quite festive even without it.

I want to thank many upper-class students for their efforts this past fall.  Thanks first go out to our 175  Welcome Week volunteers – you all helped once again to make the first week on campus an exciting and rewarding one for our entering students.  Thanks to my Enhancing Honors Mentors – you are so willing to try new things and become intrepid explorers of the city with the newbies on campus.  Finally, thanks to our Ambassadors, who got into the swing of things at the first Fall Open House and will help us out until the last spring Welcome Day.

First year students were not “volunteer slouches,” over 90 students signed up for the First Pages initiative- Honors Readers – and first year students led the pack.  Thanks to all of you!

Our newest academic advisor – Justin Silvestri – joined us in the late fall and together with Colleen Cronin and has helped to double our advising staff.  Under steady guidance of Associate Director Sheryl Mayuski, we implemented a new advising initiative that we hope will be effective in helping you chart your course on campus.

The fall classes were terrific.  In addition, students were visiting all over the city with interesting people that faculty helped them meet.  We are especially pleased to have three faculty teaching in the Honors Program this year who are interdisciplinary faculty with appointments in two separate colleges: Professor Lee Makowski – College of Engineering and College of Science, Professor Kristen Madison – Law School and Bouve College of Health Sciences, and Professor David Lazer – College of Technology and Computer Science and the College of Social Science and Humanities.  Their participation in our courses opens us to what “interdisciplinary” really means in terms of research and policy.  Our First Year Inquiry Series courses continue to build around the program’s Thematics: Social Development; Conflict and Peace Building; Science, Technology and Human Values; and, Inquiry, Advocacy and Social Values.

Updates from our Faculty in Residence at International Village include the arrival of Professor Carey Nolan’s daughter Anneka and Professor Rifat Sipahi’s success in garnering numerous grants to support his research.  Both professors joined us in fall events and we look forward to working with them in the spring.  The RA’s for the upper-class Honors Living Learning Community hosted an event that Sheryl, Justin and I attended in the late fall – it was great to meet with so many students interested in advanced honors opportunities.

Spring is always a scamper.  We will be working closely with our Ambassadors in the recruiting of a new class of students for the fall.  We will be running our spring Honors Outreach Project, along with hosting our gala Honors Evening.  We also will have an event for graduating students and their parents during Senior Week.

In addition, I am pleased to announce that we have reconfigured the Honors Student Council as the Honors Advisory Board.  We had many applications to be on the board and I think we have a nice balance of colleges and years on campus.  They will be working with the honors staff closely as we address a number of programmatic issues in the spring.

One of our target goals is to figure out what role we will play in the November meeting of the National Collegiate Honors Council which will be in Boston.  We will keep you posted as plans for that conference emerge.

We will also be running a series of fellowship workshops in the spring – please look at the new fellowship web site we worked on (http://www.northeastern.edu/fellowships/why-a-fellowship/) and give us a call if you have any questions.  Associate Director Lauren Pouchak will be taking the lead on helping you to complete your applications. We are in the midst of fellowship season and are especially interested in meeting with any juniors interested in this type of option.

We have 22 students who will be joining us in Italy this summer on our Rome Dialogue of Civilization under the tutelage of Professor Gordana Rabrenovic.  We are thrilled she is leading the trip this summer (along with our own intrepid explorer, Lauren Pouchak).  Professor Rabrenovic has led Dialogues to Belfast Ireland, the Balkans, and Israel and has spent time all over the world.  So we will benefit from her world-wide view.

We are all looking forward to working with you this spring.  As always, Carol DiCecca, our Administrative Assistant will be the first person many of you will meet with when you come through our NEW DOORS!!!  Come by and meet Justin, or join Colleen in the HOP initiative.  Sheryl is especially helpful for those of you considering a Junior-Senior Project and Lauren will be working closely with all the volunteers for First Pages.  Our terrific graduate assistants Katie Merrill and Elizabeth Jacoby will be working to help our seniors through their exit interviews among other activities.

As always, our regular programming such as Pizza and Profs, ticketed events, leadership training, and fellowships advising continues chugging along so watch the weekly notices carefully for schedules.

We will be opening up the competition for Partners in the Park soon so look for that announcement.  In addition, we will be sending out a call for mentor volunteers for next year – and will have some preliminary meetings before the end of the semester.

All and all, we are looking forward to a great semester – hope to see you at our new space!  Let us know if there is anything else we can do – stop by, the door is open.

-Maureen

Greetings:  Classes are about to start and we are in the midst of packing up and getting ready to move to our new office at 150 Richards Hall.  The space is fabulous – plenty of room to spread out and have all sorts of activities going on at the same time.   Our Open House in the new space will be September 16^th.   Welcome Week plans are set and we want to thank the upper class students who have volunteered to help us greet our new first year students.  Obviously, we can’t make that kick-off event a success without all your help.  We hope to see many of you when Dr. Atul Gawande comes to Matthews Arena to talk about his book Better.  The First Pages event will be held on Tuesday, September 6^th, at 7pm.  We are thrilled about his visit and think that his talk will be terrific.

We have just put the final touches on the First Year Inquiry series for the fall.  The courses are almost all filled and the topics range from visual music and cancer policy to the North of Ireland and Haiti.   Once again the courses are linked to one of four Thematics which are providing an academic framework for the first year experience.  The Thematics are: Social Development; Conflict and Peace Building; Science, Technology and Human Values; and, Inquiry, Advocacy and Social Values.

We will be offering Enhancing Honors this fall and I will be team teaching it with 60 upper class mentors (yikes!).  We also have on the drawing board a new one credit experience for the spring for first year students – more to follow. . .

In collaboration with Residential Life, we will be working with the two Faculty in Residence at International Village – Professor Rifat Sipahi from Engineering and Professor Carey Nolan from Communication Studies.  We will also be turning to the resident directors in West Village F and C to develop some targeted upper class programming.

Our Honors Evening was a smash in April – many posters, good conversation, and good food.  Our excited group of graduating seniors managed to stand still long enough for a farewell portrait with their Honors cords casually hanging around their necks.  Then they all scattered in many directions including the workplace, a volunteer year or two for programs such as Teach for America, medical or law school, MBA programs, or more traditional graduate program degrees ranging from Ph.D.s in history to economics.   We had two students who won Fulbrights and one is heading to Russia and the other one to India.  We also had a student win a Clinton Foundation Award and she will be going to India.  We have a fourth student who won a Critical Language Award and spent the summer studying in Russia.

As you know, we are the “go to” office on campus for all nationally competitive scholarships and fellowships and we have been working all summer with a group of candidates who are applying for the Fulbright Fellowship due in October.  If you have any questions about possible fellowship competitions, make an appointment to meet with either myself or Associate Director Lauren Pouchak who works with me on these competitions.

We spent our second summer in Italy on our Honors Dialogue to Rome.  Twenty-two intrepid explorers joined Professor Danny Faber from Sociology and Anthropology, and our own Associate Director Lauren Pouchak to study the Slow Food movement and learn some basics in Italian.  It sounds like it was great fun and a perfect way to complete the upper class Interdisciplinary Seminar requirement.

This summer 12 of our students went on Partners in the Park, a National Collegiate Honors Council initiative.  We had students all over the country including national parks in the West and Southeast – we have some great pictures and hope that some of you consider applying for this great program next spring.

We are all looking forward to working with you this fall.  As always, Carol DiCecca, our Administrative Assistant will be the first person many of you will meet with when you come through our NEW DOORS!!!  Lauren Pouchak and Sheryl Mayuski, our Associate Directors, continue to be perhaps the best planning and delivering pair on campus.  Colleen Cronin, our Academic Advisor will continue to expand her footprint within the program and she will be joined soon by a second advisor when we move to our new digs.   Colleen will work closely with me in Enhancing Honors this fall which I anticipate will make for smoother sailing.  Graduate Assistant Katie Merrill has returned for her second year and will help out on many fronts including Enhancing Honors and Elizabeth Jacoby is our new first year Graduate Assistant.

As always, our regular programming such as Pizza and Profs, concert tickets, leadership training, and fellowships advising continue to be regular programming initiatives.  At some point soon – when the dust settles after Dr. Gawande comes to campus – we will be starting our search for next year’s First Pages book.  Look for an announcement to help out in the mid-fall.

All and all, we are looking forward to a great year – hope to see you at the Open House!  Let us know if there is anything else we can do – stop by, the door is open.

- Maureen

A new semester always seems like a fresh start – a moment to set goals and reach out to the new faculty and students who will share your learning adventure