WITH HONORS
Some students are smart, others just plain motivated. These are both.
Written by Cory Chandler
Some students are smart, others just plain motivated. These are both.
Meredith Slaughter can’t recall exactly when she first heard about Texas Tech’s Honors College—it was sometime during freshman orientation. But Slaughter, formerly an honors student at Andrews (Texas) High School, remembers she latched onto the prospect immediately.
“It seemed like the natural thing to do,” she says.
Now a senior, Slaughter has enjoyed an educational experience comparable to that provided on a cozy liberal arts campus while reaping the benefits of an expansive research institution.
She attends small, discussion-oriented classes. She has access to organizations and dormitories allotted for honors students. She gets to work shoulder-to-shoulder with some of Texas Tech’s top professors while also pursuing undergraduate research. And she is encouraged and challenged by some of the university’s brightest student minds.
“You get the opportunity to meet other kids who are interested in enriching their college experience,” she says.
This is a chief benefit of an Honor’s College education. Dean Gary Bell describes the formula this way: Put motivated and intelligent individuals together and let them feed off each other. The college recruits and enriches “academically capable” students by, in part, offering a wide-ranging slate of challenging courses.
The goals are lofty: Instill critical thinking skills, emphasize global awareness, teach students to synthesize seemingly disparate information, foster excellence. Results can be impressive.
The college’s roughly 900 students boast a 3.71 average GPA. Its typical entering freshman has an SAT score of 1348. (The college, in fact, probably has had a hand in raising entering SAT scores at the university. Bell points out that since 1993, the average SAT score for entering freshmen at Texas Tech has jumped from 963 to an impressive 1131.)
Not that brains are the only thing going for this bunch. It’s their determination that really sets these students above par.
“The kids have plugged into the importance of education,” Bell says. “They are eager to take advantage of educational opportunities Texas Tech provides.”
Last year Bell taught a class of 24 freshman honors students. Far from the attendance-deficient freshmen of stereotype, these students never missed a class. They made perfect attendance a goal and acted accordingly. They got on cell phones to prod each other to class. One girl even arrived after receiving a concussion the night before. It’s this competition – “good” competition, as opposed to the rivalry that sometimes embitters classmates – that fuels the students, Bell says. “That’s the type of thing that happens in the Honors College,” he says.
Add to this a broad curriculum that encourages students to tackle a variety of subjects and, taken in sum, Bell says these offerings instill the habits that lead to career success.
“I was a very serious student and I really wanted to learn every day,” says Rachael Novier, an alumna of the college. “The rigor of the Honors College provided what I needed.”
Novier, now deputy press secretary for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, shines as an example of the successes the college has turned out since it was established in 1998 (the honors program has existed since 1952). She joined the honors program in 1996 and watched the infant college blossom.
She credits the college for building her academic confidence and opening doors for campus participation. And, during a current events seminar taught by Bell, she got her first taste of politics and public service.
It stuck. She has since worked as a staffer for former District 19 Congressman Larry Combest, studied public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, served a stint in the FBI’s Office of Strategic Planning and ventured abroad to Istanbul, Turkey. The Honors College is still family to her.
“I still check in on the Honors College website regularly to see how things are changing,” she says. “I have no doubt that if I walked into the Honors College today it would still feel like home.”
Story by Cory Chandler; Photography by Neal Hinkle
A High Achiever’s JourneyRachael Novier describes herself as a “born” English major and picked Texas Tech before she knew it offered an honors program. Yet this high achiever found a comfortable home and a new career focus in the university’s budding Honors College. “The Honors College was what kept me engaged and made my college experience extremely positive,” she says. Indeed, Novier graduated from the university with no grade below an A. From there, she went to work for District 19 Congressman Larry Combest. This led her to pursue a graduate degree at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She describes her two years at Harvard as transformative. She witnessed the contentious vote recounts of the 2000 presidential election and also the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the company of professors and students who have become world leaders. This led her to a Presidential Management Fellowship in the FBI’s Office of Strategic Planning, where Novier worked on a team that helped steer the FBI in a new direction following the terrorist attacks.
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From there, she spent 15 months in Istanbul before returning to Texas to take a position as a homeland security analyst in Gov. Perry’s Office of Homeland Security. Novier says her current job as deputy press secretary for the governor (a position that fills her days with media calls, press releases, photo ops and travel) gives her a whirlwind education on the policy issues that Plus, “I have to pinch myself every day when I go to work in the Texas Capitol each morning.” Her secret to success? Motivation, largely – the same strategy she applied to classes at Texas Tech. She points out that her SAT score was “solid, but not spectacular.” “I want everyone out there who didn’t get an eye-popping SAT score to know that success in college depends much more on how excited you are to go to class and learn each day,” she says.
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For more information, visit the Honors College Web site: www.depts.ttu.edu/honors/
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806-742-2136
Photos by Neal Hinkle
Web layout by Jon Fox