Paxton talks about the Honors College Experience at SRU

The following is an computer-generated summary of the video transcript.

I just want to talk to you all about honors at s are you and give you some more of the details of what our program is like. I am currently a senior in the honors college, and I have been a part of the honors college since I was a freshman. You conjoined at any point in your journey at s are you so to start when I came in as a freshman, I was really excited just to meet other people in honors and kind of get a sense of community. So I actually chose to live in the honor storms, which is totally optional. You do not have to do it, but with my experience, I was able to network with other honor students and just make a lot of friends on my floor. We would go toe honors events together, eat together, study together for our honors classes. There are also a lot of leadership experiences in honors, so I just want to tell you about some of those, um, to start, we do have a mentoring program for first year on our students, and we have current on. Our students actually act as the mentors, so it is an on campus job. It's also really great leadership experience for upperclassmen to gain and help, um, underclassmen navigate the experience. We also have a diversity council in honors that is composed of all honor students, which is awesome. Thio basically, um, change outcomes that we have an honors to reflect social justice and efforts to become more inclusive on campus. So they do a lot of educating students in holding different events for students, which is awesome and something that we're really proud of with statistics and honors. In 2018, we only had 3.8% of underrepresented minorities and honors, and we're now proud to say that as of 2020 we have 29.2% of underrepresented minorities. So we're definitely working really hard to increase diversity in honors and create a more inclusive environment for our honor students. Another leadership experience that you can look forward to and honors is being part of our executive board which I've been lucky enough to participate with the past three years. So my sophomore year, I served as a fundraising co chair. I served as an events co chair, and this year I am actually president. So it's been a really awesome journey, and I've experienced a lot of growth throughout these three years. My leadership skills go, and that has been really beneficial. Our executive board is completely student ran, so all of the positions I'm about to go over our positions. That air held by our student health and wellness is one of our chairs, so they basically create experiences and opportunities for students to focus on exactly that their health and wellness. We also have fundraising co chairs that actually fundraise for a different social cause. Every year we have events, chairs that plan a ton of different events for honor students to engage in, have fun within, build a better sense of community. We also have PR and recruitment chairs that work to run our social media and create a lot of awesome graphics. Just to display are different events in recruit new students and we also have a civic engagement chair that focuses on some of these social causes and actually plan some events that students can engage in at their time in honors. Another awesome part of our honors experience is that we have a lot of different travel opportunities for students with our spring trip. With that trip that students actually get to go and explore the city, we do have a little built in experience where students can really engage with the city further, and then we come together and talk about it as a group. So in the past few years we've actually taken over 100 students on this trip, so it is a lot of fun and something that a lot of students get toe look forward to. We also have chances to actually travel internationally, so some of our honors classes have a travel component that you take the honors course throughout the semester and then once the semester is over, you can actually travel internationally and it goes with that trip. So we offer experiences like that and then also, every year we team up with other honors programs in colleges in the state system university and do an international trip that way. So I was actually selected through an application process last year to go to Spain for this trip. That is normally an opportunity that many students get excited about and choose to apply for. One of the perks with being a part of honors is you do get priority scheduling and registration. Overall, our honors experience is really what you make of it. So there is no set curriculum, no set honors courses that you have to take during your time here. Um, some of those ways are taking honors classes, uh, doing international abroad trips, doing national conferences research. So that is really nice that you can build your own experience to touch a little bit more. So it does allow for a lot more interaction with faculty and a chance for you to get to know the peers in your classes. They're actually Biltmore on discussions and writing papers and really thinking critically about the material that you're learning. Thank you all for tuning in with me and learning more about honors at Slippery Rock University Mhm..