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Honors Society Provides Opportunities for HCC Students

Did you know that some students are entitled to money to pay for their schooling?  That’s right, entitled.  By becoming a member of Housatonic’s chapter of Phi Theta Kappa (PTK), the honor society for community college students, scholars can automatically receive funds to attend certain colleges.

                 Madeline Burbank, an advisor to our PTK chapter, said, “We had a student come in the other day who brought a letter [from Sacred Heart University] and the brochure for transfer students stated […] that members of PTK are entitled to a $4000 scholarship.  They don’t have to apply their membership alone qualifies them.”

                 The PTK website, www.ptk.org, states that there are over $35 million worth of scholarships available to their members; “Members of Phi Theta Kappa may apply for more than $35 million in transfer scholarships, provided exclusively to Society members by more than 600 senior institutions.”

                 Burbank receives these sorts of offers all the time for members of the Honor Society.  “Almost every week, we get notified by e-mail by colleges who want to recruit our membership because they know that students who’ve achieved at that level at the community college have a very good track record in terms of completing their schooling and doing really well.  So they are actively seeking out PTK members […] I have a drawer full of brochures from different colleges.”

                 The first requirement for joining Phi Theta Kappa is competing at least 30 credits while maintaining a 3.5 grade point average.  The next requirement is four teachers must nominate the student.

                 As, Rebecca Samberg, another advisor to the PTK chapter explains, “The instructional research person at the college puts together a database of the students who have met these two requirements, [and] generates a list which gets sent out to all the faculty, who then nominate students they’ve had who they know are worthy of the honor.”

                 Essentially, students don’t nominate themselves; they have to be remembered by teachers to get the recommendations.  Students are not directly involved in the eligibility process and membership is by invitation only.  This ensures that only students who stand out are recognized for these honors. 

                 “So while we had a very long list of names of people who qualified in terms of the credits they had and their G.P.A., the actual list of number of nominees was 79, a much smaller number,” says Burbank.

                 Individual teachers have their own criterion for selecting which students they will recommend.  Burbank would look for not only, “academic achievement, but to what degree do they express a form of leadership in the classroom.  Are they someone who represents all the qualities in a student that we look for?  Curiosity, intellectual rigor, critical thinking.  [It’s] a number of different qualities.  It’s not like I have a list in my mind and I check them off, but you know, in each class, certain students just stand out.  They’re interested in the topic, they’re active learners, they engage other students in the learning process.  Those are qualities that I want to recognize.  Other people may have more purely test-oriented performance criteria.”

                 It’s important to note that the Honor Society is not the same thing as the Honors Program.  Samberg says, “The Honors Program is a series of courses that students take where they have more challenging assignments than they do in the traditional college course.  The Honor Society is a recognition of their academic status at the college.”

                 Right now, the Housatonic Honor Society is not very active beyond their May induction ceremony, but Burbank is hoping to change that. 

                 “We hope to make [PTK] a more active organization on campus […] A lot of chapters in various two-year schools have a community service orientation, and we did have one member last year who organized a food and book drive around graduation in which donations were made to local shelters and early childhood centers with children’s books, and that was very successful, and that’s the kind of thing that a lot of organizations do,” says Burbank.

                 Burbank went on to add that PTK offers many opportunities on a national level beyond scholarships. “including electronic seminars, conferences, leadership training programs.”

                 To find out more about the Honor Society, you can visit the Phi Theta Kappa website, or contact Samberg in B110 or Burbank in A216 during their office hours.

Copyright 2004

Phi Theta Kappa Seal

By Amanda Evans

Date: 05/06/04