The Pursuit of Excellence

To “graduate with honors.”

It sounds nice. High-achieving students may opt to go for it simply because it sounds like the high-achieving thing to do.

But administrators in Louisiana Tech University’s recently created Honors College found students weren’t always given the chance to consider the reasons and benefits to participating in the honors program.

“Students don’t often give themselves permission to think about why they’re doing what they’re doing,” said Joel Stake, assistant director of the Honors College. “They get a lot of the ‘what’ and ‘how.’ The programs are fantastic academically, but (students) don’t give themselves permission to think about why it matters.”

That’s part of why the concept of honors is undergoing a transformation at Louisiana Tech — from a simple collection of credit hours to a broad slate of offerings and programs brought together under one mission: to promote excellence.

Now, participation in the Honors College can mean hands-on undergraduate research opportunities in one’s field, a chance to compete for national scholarship awards, studying overseas, or even service and networking opportunities with a historic honors society.

“These are programs for students who want more out of their experience than just to go to class and get their degree and their job,” Stake said.

No longer operating out of a corner of a classroom building, the Honors College now has its own home building at historic University Hall just off the Quad.

It now offers five main programs.

• The Honors Program: The traditional 21-hour curriculum of honors courses, with some new features coming in the fall

• Undergraduate Research and Service Learning: Dedicated to engaging and equipping students for undergraduate research, culminating in a yearly symposium

• Nationally competitive awards: A home for identifying and helping students compete for prestigious awards like the Barry Goldwater Scholarship

• Study abroad: Increasingly multi-discplinary opportunities to experience other cultures and obtain a more global perspective of one’s field

• Phi Kappa Phi: One of the oldest and most respected honors societies in the U.S.

While students apply for acceptance into the honors program while in high school as before, the other programs under the new Honors College do not require students to be in honors.

“When we say the Honors College is here to promote excellence across the university, what we mean is, any student who’s pursuing excellence, whether they’re in the honors program or not, we want them to have access to our resources,” Honors College Director Joe Koskie said.

For the honors program itself, Koskie and Stake wanted to give students a unifying thread that tied their disparate honors courses together over the course of their careers — something that allowed students to better consider that question of why they’re participating in the first place.

That became the e-portfolio, a new offering that will roll out in the fall.

Students will develop their e-portfolio throughout their honors program education, uploading their coursework, undergraduate research and other academic components, but also going through guided self-reflection each year on how they’ve developed as individuals, not just students.

“It does two things: It allows them to look internally, but it also allows third-party access to the e-portfolio and becomes a living resume,” Stake said. “So they can allow potential graduate schools, medical schools or internships to look at what they’ve done as they apply for those jobs. So it’s both internal and external.”

The program has expanded to include more honors classes across more fields of study in recent years, and that will be a continued focus as the Honors College seeks to become more of a melting pot of disciplines.

One area where that is manifesting is the Undergraduate Research and Service-learning Symposium, an annual display of student work that the Honors College has taken over and put on for the first time in March.

In that way, the Honors College hopes to serve as a sort of meeting point for Tech’s academic colleges to exchange ideas.

“I think it’s really important that we let each of the colleges come together to see how research and scholarly work gets accomplished in a variety of fields,” Stake said. “When you bring everyone together, you get to see as a biologist how a philosophy person does research.”

A brand new offering for the university is the Nationally Competitive Awards program. The Honors College is aiming to become an incubator to equip students to apply for and win prestigious research awards.

And it’s already well on the way, as in its first year the college helped produce two Barry Goldwater Scholars — Tech’s first ever — as well as a finalist for the Harry S. Truman scholarship.

Koskie believes Tech is capable of achieving that and more year in and year out.

“What we needed was some kind of an institutional home for something like that, so it didn’t just depend on individuals who cared about it and would come and go from the university,” he said. “It need a home on campus where there would always be a place to put resources and energy, a place to identify and recruit talented students and give them the mentoring they need to apply to scholarships.”

Another way that the Honors College is hoping to become more cross-discipline is in reviving and expanding the study abroad program.

Last summer Koskie and Stake led a trip to Rome that blended science with history, as students and faculty learned about the Roman Colosseum’s effect on modern medicine. Gladiator fights were one of the first permissible ways by which scholars were able to examine the human body from the inside, as stitching together the emperor’s gladiators circumvented taboos on human dissection.

It was the first STEM-related offering through the study abroad program in many years. Now the Honors College hopes to make that more of a regular occurrence.

Lastly, the historic honors society of Phi Kappa Phi is now also housed under the Honors College.

This long-standing chapter offers many scholarship and networking opportunities but is still in the process of reviving and expanding after a period of decline.

“Students are inundated with so-called honors societies that are really just looking for their money, so letting people know this is a very legitimate society you can participate in is something we’re still working on,” Koskie said.

Koskie and Stake credit former Tech President Les Guice with the vision to relocate the Honors College to University Hall.

The new home is allowing the honors program to develop more of a sense of cohesion among students as it offers space for students to study and hang out between classes.

From the move to the new program slate, it’s all done to help students both inside and outside the honors program invest in more than just their academic achievement, but also their sense of self.

“Self-knowledge is really the key to wisdom and opens the doors of understanding to every field you could possibly study,” Koskie said. “All knowledge is human knowledge. To bring that back into the heart of education is definitely part of what we mean by excellence.

”Excellence is not just accomplishing things and having a good GPA. Excellence is also the flourishing of every dimension of the human being.”