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Exceptional Experiences for Exceptional Students

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Students and Faculty in the Rediscovering 1912 Honors Course

By Shelby Schultheis ’14

The Honors Program provides opportunities for academic and co-curricular achievement.

For Alan Pham, an English major, the greatest benefit he derives from being in the Honors Program comes from the specialized courses that offer in-depth study on a multitude of subjects. “For me, that provides the opportunity to find something that really interests me and offers a lot of knowledge,” Pham says. Currently, he is taking a philosophy course about Nietzsche and evolutionary ethics that he is really enjoying.

While participation in the Honors Program looks amazing on résumés, the pursuit of knowledge is what drives Loyola’s Honors students to continue this level of education after their high school years.

The Honors Program through the Years

The Honors Program at Loyola has seen many changes over the years since its origin nearly three decades ago. The program was originally designed for students who received the full Presidential scholarship and included a specialized Honors curriculum of 48 credit hours, which replaced their Common Curriculum requirements. This lasted until nearly 2004.

The program began undergoing significant revisions post-Katrina. Now, a senior thesis is required and 28 Honors credits replace Common Curriculum credits. In 2009, the program was moved out of the College of Humanities and Natural Sciences, which made it easier for non-humanities majors to join the program.

For many years, the Honors Program was run by part-time directors, but after the program went under an external review by the National Collegiate Honors Council in 2010, a full-time director was sought. The council also recommended that the director report directly to the provost and that the Honors Program should feature certain core courses, among other things.

A national search was conducted for the first full-time director, and Naomi Yavneh Klos, Ph.D., was hired.

Yavneh states that one of her duties is to make sure that the Honors Program serves students in every college and major and also to ensure that their college experience is enhanced, not hindered, by their participation in the program.

Biology and Latin American studies senior Jordan Harbaugh has been in the Honors Program during some of its significant structural changes.

“It’s been great,” Harbaugh says. “Some of these courses really integrate the course subject into the modern world and apply it to people’s lives, and that’s been an effective educational experience for me, and for other people.”

Harbaugh has taken classes on Catholic Perspectives on Immigration, the Bible and the Media, and Medical Ethics. The Bible and the Media course looked at how passages from the Bible have been misused and misinterpreted by the media and have led to the development of false concepts about the Bible’s teachings.

Harbaugh is also involved in the Community Engagement Portfolio, which is now being offered by the Honors Program. The portfolio involves 20 recorded service hours, as well as reflection meetings with guest speakers and the Honors director throughout the semester. The goal is to make community engagement an integral part of Honors, as well as to help students be more mindful about their experiences, according to Yavneh.

“I’ve been involved with other service learning and volunteer opportunities, and I think it’s a great thing to have the Honors students be involved in the community,” Harbaugh says.

Student Qualifications

Being accepted into the Honors Program is no small feat. For incoming students to be considered for the program, they must have at least a 3.5 GPA on the 4-point scale and a combined reading and math score of 1300 or higher on the SAT, or a composite score of 29 or above on the ACT. Also required are an Honors-specific statement of interest and two letters of recommendation. In addition, extra-curricular programs and volunteer work are taken into consideration.

For regular students who have taken all of their introductory courses and decide that they want to be in Honors starting their sophomore year, problems arise because the required Common Curriculum classes they have taken are not equivalent in subject matter to the Honors required classes. This stems from how the classes for regular students and Honors students are structured. Regular students in an Introduction to World Religions class, for example, would learn their material in a broad manner, spending two weeks on one religion before moving to the next one. Honors classes are generally more interdisciplinary and focused on a special topic such as The Bible and the Media or International Human Rights.

When students decide to transfer into the program, decisions must be made as to whether the regular Common Curriculum classes that they’ve taken will have to be replaced with Honors courses and if re-taking these classes will affect the students’ graduation times.

“There are ways to solve that; it’s just a question of sitting down and working it out,” Yavneh says. “We want to be sure that every qualified and motivated student is able to participate in Honors.”

Starting this year, the Honors Program has actively recruited regular students who showed Honors potential during their first semester at Loyola. According to Yavneh, 16 students from Loyola joined the Honors Program for the spring semester.

Extracurricular Activities and Thesis Projects

Honors students are self-motivated, which is essential for their senior thesis projects, as well as the extracurricular activities they undertake during their time at Loyola. Pedro Benitez, economics sophomore, resurrected Loyola’s Quiz Bowl team, which had been dormant for nearly 16 years. A Quiz Bowl competition consists of two teams being asked trivia questions and buzzing in with the correct answer to get points.

“Our director, Professor Yavneh, got an e-mail saying ‘Would you like to participate in this Honors Quiz Bowl competition?’ so I jumped at it,” Benitez says. “We played on a regional competition last year and we got third place. We already played Tulane last semester and we crushed them, so that was a great success. The team is my little baby to Honors, and I’m proud of it.”

The Honors Program is also active in helping the surrounding community. Several Honors students provide ACT tutoring in the Elevate program, which helps athletically gifted high school students from underprivileged backgrounds prepare for college. Other students volunteer at Anna’s Arts for Kids or participate in the monthly freerice.com gatherings where they help end world hunger.

Mara Steven is currently serving as the service coordinator for the University Honors Association and is active in many of the projects she plans as well. She’s also majoring in history pre-law and psychology, with a minor in business.

“All of the projects not only help our local and global communities, but also they provide a great opportunity to foster friendships with fellow Honors students,” Steven says.

The University Honors Association is open to all Honors students and advises the program director on academic matters, organizes co-curricular programs, and coordinates the mentoring program.

Other service projects organized by the University Honors Association are the St. Bernard Project and a collaborative project with a local farming initiative.

Psychology and pre-med major Monica Ohakwe participated in both of these projects. “For the St. Bernard Project, my group helped rebuild the house of the Breaux family which was severely affected by Katrina. My job was to help put insulation under the house,” Ohakwe says. During Wolves on the Prowl, we were helping a group of people prepare a field to become a local community garden. We dug through the soil, removing large rocks, grubs, and pieces of trash so that the soil could be used to grow crops and keep chickens.”

Most first-year Honors students get to live on the 11th floor of Buddig residence hall, which fosters friendships among like-minded students.

“Immediately you get to meet all these people who share this love of knowledge, so to speak,” Benitez says, “So instantaneously I found four or five friends who have been with me through this whole college experience.”

Sam Winstrom, the current resident assistant for the Honors floor and an Honors student himself majoring in mass communication on the journalism track and minoring in film studies, states that organizing activities for his students is vastly different than being a resident assistant for other floors.
“It’s a really different experience than you get working for and living on other floors because everybody’s been so independent and just self-driven.”
Being self-driven and independent is crucial for Honors students when they’re developing their senior theses.

“The goal of the senior thesis is for the student to engage in some kind of original research, scholarship, or creative activity,” Yavneh says. “Ideally, it’s something that is original and is genuinely making a contribution to the discipline.”

One such contribution was created by an Honors horn player who researched repetitive motion injuries in horn players and developed a preventative measures handbook and then presented her work to other brass instrument musicians at Loyola.

Although many students pursue a thesis in line with their major, those with a proficiency in another subject can choose to follow their muse there. According to Yavneh, last year a student who double majored in psychology and Spanish chose to do her thesis in creative writing since she had proficiency in that subject, although she did not pursue the subject formally. For her thesis project, she used the poetry of both her grandmother and of her mother and wrote her own poems in dialogue with these. She framed the work with a memoir.

Garrett Fonteneau ’12, a history and sociology major now applying to graduate school, did his thesis on currency under the Articles of Confederation and used primary sources such as the journals of Congress and newspapers from that time period. He won awards from Honors, the history department, and the Monroe Library for his research.

spacer Working with primary sources is another attribute of being an Honors student at Loyola. Since the Honors Program has taken up residency in the Monroe Library, Yavneh is looking forward to more research collaborations. Rediscovering 1912, which Yavneh co-taught with associate research librarian Teri Oaks Gallaway, interim director of public services at Loyola’s J. Edgar and Louise S. Monroe Library, provided Honors students hands-on access to original historical documents related to the State of Louisiana’s bicentennial, the centennial of the Girl Scouts of America, and the centennial of Loyola University New Orleans, all of which took place in 2012. The public exhibitions they created were displayed at the capitol in Baton Rouge during the state’s bicentennial celebrations, the Girl Scout Centennial Extravaganza in Gonzalez, La., and on Loyola’s campus during its centennial celebrations. Yavneh, Gallaway, and students from the class later attended the 2012 National Collegiate Honors Council conference, at which they presented their work and the methods of the class, receiving high marks from national jurors.

“Our students have some pretty amazing academic and intellectual gifts of curiosity,” Yavneh says, “and I think being in the library will really give us a chance to be able to display that more. We now have our own display cases for exhibiting documents, so come by Honors and learn something new!”


Shelby Schultheis ’14 (English) is the publications intern for the Office of Marketing and Communications during the spring 2013 semester.

View the complete spring 2013 issue of LOYNO. 

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