Dean's Message
Don’t pay attention to the temperatures outside. We are ready for a crisp autumn, the wonderful ripening of thought and friendship, the golden turn of leaves and of minds. Welcome!
We’ve had a summer of Olympians, one of the most notable of them an unassuming competitor who plays Rocket League, who wears glasses, and who solved a Rubik’s cube in under ten seconds the morning he won the bronze medal. Yes, I mean Stephen Nedoroscik. Amid the buzz and the memes and the press coverage of his “clutch effort,” it’s striking how this powerful athlete spoke of the “we” and the remarkable performances of the competitors around him. He didn’t watch the scores, he says, and only saw how others had been rated when his feet hit the ground.
You can draw your own lessons from his story. As I look ahead to this year, I think I’ll choose to remember the moment he looked up after landing and grinned, the moment before his glasses became a meme and he went viral. The moment of joy after hard work.
In the coming year, we’ll be celebrating the 10th year anniversary of the Dorothy and Bill Cohen Honors College and the long history of Honors at Wichita State that started with the founding of an honors program in 1957. Please keep an eye out for opportunities to engage with alumni throughout this year as we work to increase diversity and dialogue, student success and access in Honors.
Original Honors College Concept
In 2014, we were guided by the benefits we sought to provide by forming an Honors College on this campus. Those included:
- Emphasizing academic rigor along with exploration, creativity, and discovery
- Providing Honors students individualized advising and priority enrollment
- Engaging students in intellectual dialogue and real-world problems
- Facilitating undergraduate research across campus
- Preparing students for top graduate schools, competitive national scholarships, and leadership roles in professional careers
- Supporting interdisciplinary courses and curriculum development
- Serving as a curricular laboratory for faculty to experiment with course design and content
Today I ask you: Are we meeting these goals? And what should our new goals and strategies be as we approach 10 years as a college and chart a path for the next 10 years?
College Playbook
We have a College Playbook that aligns our work with university and presidential priorities, particularly with the university-wide initiative to promote student success and close the equity gap in our persistence and graduation rates.
Our priorities and strategies include aiming to:
- Spark the interest of diverse student populations by creating course content that
speaks to their cultural experiences and realities
- Over the past three years, faculty have developed new courses including Black Lives Matter, History of Genocide, multiple service-learning opportunities in courses and experiences such Leadership Academy and BILL’S Trip, new first-year seminars over the past four years, and a course that is offered this fall by a new faculty engaged in honors because a student requested it - War: Strategic Studies.
- If there’s a course or topic you want to see in our schedule, talk to faculty members. Let us know. We want to know what issues and ideas are most interesting to you, to be in dialogue with our ideas and interests.
- Increase connections to community partners, including increasing connections to the neighborhood around our campus
- Increase access to undergraduate research and innovation pipeline programs for all students not only honors students
- Increase funding for students with financial need. We’ve made some progress in the
last three years
- We are now able to award at least $1000 to every honors student with high financial need, and we hope to do more in future.
- Increase outreach to current students, and we’ve made some progress in this area with email and phone outreach, visits to campus organizations
- Design a first-year Honors experience that builds community
- We created a new required Honors Colloquium that meets twice each semester for first-year students beginning in fall 2023
In that list you heard: diversity, connections, access, funding, outreach, experience - all guiding values for our work in Honors.
Feedback for Looking Forward
Today we want to start to look forward to next year and beyond, and we hope throughout this year you'll share feedback that will help us meet your needs and ambitions.
On April 15, 2015, Dorothy and Bill Cohen made their naming gift to the Honors College official – and in their remarks that day, they said they wanted to continue to support the great ambitions of Wichita State University students. They wanted to support Honors to join knowledge and innovation to grow visionaries.
You are those visionaries they speak of. They want you to dream big dreams, and it is our job to help make those dreams a reality. We will succeed sometimes and fail sometimes, and we want you to help us get better. I’ve given you some big picture questions and strategies that we are working on.
- Do you have an idea? Talk to one of the faculty or student council members. We’d be happy to hear from you.
Please let us know what matters to you!
