Calvin to Celebrate Honors Convocation

April 17, 2006 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Calvin College will hold its 51st Honors Convocation at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, April 19 in the college's Fine Arts Center.

The occasion will celebrate not only the 54 students who will receive gold medallions for graduating with honors from Calvin, but the sizeable contingent of the student body, 1,438-strong, that was featured on the Dean's List for 2005.

Deborah Kwak, a political science and honors French major, and Calvin chemistry professor Doug Vander Griend will address the honorees and their families as well as faculty and well-wishers. A reception follows the event.

"We are blessed with an amazing number of top students," says Ken Bratt, professor of classical languages and director of the honors program. "What better way to honor what the students have achieved than by celebrating with them once a year?"

Among this year's honors graduates are a Fulbright Scholarship recipient who is among a handful of Calvin students who have earned honors in two subjects.

Laura Peterson, an honors graduate in both English and German, recently won a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship to study the literature of Turkish immigrants in German society. Three other students will also graduate Calvin with double honors: Matthew Bloem in English and history, David Bratt in philosophy and Asian studies and Paul Rietema in philosophy and economics.

The variety of student honors represented at the convocation, a Calvin tradition since 1955, are a testament to the growth of the honors program over the last 13 years, Bratt says. In 1993, when he assumed the directorship of the program, Calvin's honors graduates numbered only two.

"Back then, we had only freshman honors classes in a handful of disciplines," Bratt says. "The only way a student could graduate with honors was by taking the initiative to set up junior or senior honors projects for him or herself."

Since that time, Calvin has given more structure to the honors program, strengthening honors requirements in all Calvin disciplines and finding ways to recognize and encourage academic talent early on.

However, Bratt is quick to dispel any notion that honors students are cloistered from the general student body as they are in many other colleges.

"That sort of elitism would not fly at Calvin," he says.

Rather, the Calvin honors program is wide open to any applicant who qualifies, and many do. Though Calvin casts a large net*accepting 98 percent of applicants*a large percentage of them are high-performing students.

"It's one of the unusual things about Calvin," Bratt says. "One third of our entering class ranks in the top ten percent of college freshmen nationally, as measured by ACT scores. For the last three years, one-third of our incoming class has qualified for honors. We have a good critical mass of top students. It would be a disservice to them to limit the honors program to a small fraction. Our approach is to give them all a shot."

And even Calvin students who do not choose to graduate with honors often have excellent academic careers, he notes, as represented by the number of Dean's List honorees this year.

For the full story see http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2005_06/honors_convocation.htm

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Received on Mon Apr 17 09:52:33 2006