Adelia Humme ’15 is a graduate of the University Honors program and served LAUNCH as an Honors advisor in the 2015-2016 year. She is now pursuing a master’s in Publishing & Writing at Emerson College. She hopes to demonstrate to new Honors students how their involvement in University Honors can help them achieve their post-graduation goals.
One of the frequent questions that I hear from prospective students who are considering University Honors is What’s the benefit of joining Honors? Students facing the options of various academic programs, as well as more than 800 student organizations at Texas A&M, are right to wonder how their time commitments contribute to their end goals of pursuing further schooling or a career. One way I respond to this question is by emphasizing that any Honors program is what you make of it. LAUNCH provides opportunities and encourages students to reflect on them, but how much you engage is up to you. The second half of my response is more concrete because hearing examples of how I drew connections between my Honors experience and my graduate school plans may help students better visualize how they can benefit from University Honors too.
Firstly, Honors courses gave me the opportunity to focus on the subjects that interest me most and to tailor my coursework to my career plans. Projects in my Honors classes often allowed me to choose a topic to research throughout the semester. One such course was introductory marketing for business minors, which I course contracted for Honors credit. My professor and I designed an independent study project in which I assessed the impacts of digitalization on the book publishing industry, the field I planned to enter after graduation. When I applied for a master’s in Publishing and Writing at Emerson College a year later, I referenced the report and annotated bibliography I created in that marketing class in my application essay.
I was also able to link my mentorship involvement in Honors to my graduate school plans. In the application essay, I described how serving as a Sophomore Advisor (SA) taught me how to exercise judgement, to be patient, and to be open to new perspectives, all skills that will serve me well in my next degree. Since being an SA was so impactful to my college experience, I also learned that finding success in graduate school will greatly depend on how I invest my time outside of the classroom. I will have to intentionally seek opportunities for professional development and not rely only on my coursework.
My capstone, too, was instrumental in shaping my college learning. As an Undergraduate Teacher Scholar, I was surprised to discover how much behind-the-scenes effort goes into planning a class. My faculty mentor and I were responsible for creating a course webpage, selecting specific editions of texts for our class, arranging classroom space, and calculating grade averages, all work that I never saw as a student. I realized that every career involves much more than meets the eye and that I need firsthand experience in the publishing industry to understand the challenges of that field.
Another influential aspect of my Honors involvement was University Scholars, a personal development program with a rigorous selection process. The program developed my skills in interviewing, respectful debate, and public speaking to both small groups and large audiences. I anticipate using all of these qualities during my master’s degree and especially in my dream job as a book editor. The flexibility and creativity of University Scholars built my confidence in my career plans and in my ability to share those plans with professors, classmates, and potential employers.
As incoming freshmen, you may not yet be able to see how all the puzzle pieces of your college activities fit together – and that’s okay! One purpose of the first-year seminar for University Honors freshmen is to help you begin connecting those dots. Four years from now, when you prepare to graduate, you may be as surprised as I was to see how much each of your experiences contributed to “the big picture.”
