Southwestern Community College honors students, from left, Stacy Sprague, Gosia Chockla, Emily Elders and David Satterlee compare notes about the added experience and exposure they received in their honors projects. The four presented their findings to faculty and administration during a luncheon, donated by Zaxby’s, Wednesday, Sept. 9, on the Jackson Campus.

"The honors coursework is designed to enrich and expand the expectations of the traditional college course," said Gene Couch, vice president for instruction and student services. "It focuses on academic excellence, including critical thinking, communication skills and academic inquiry."

Emily Elders of Sylva meets as a trio with English instructors Owen Gibby and Allan Grant in researching major American writers to trace and discover what it means to be an American.

“Students aren’t the only ones benefitting from the honors program,” said Grant. “As faculty we benefit from their work. I’ve used excerpts from several of their papers as teaching aides in my classroom- giving the students credit, of course.”

The honors program demands a lot of extra work, students like Gosia Chockla of Whittier admit. “My project dealt with math and how to incorporate alternative assessment rather than traditional testing,” said Chockla, who told college officials at the luncheon that “even though it was a lot of work, it was certainly worth the extra effort.”

One of the benefits of the honors program is taking the projects outside the classroom and into the community, said SCC criminal justice/cyber crime instructor Mike Burnette. One of his criminal justice students designed a project to fingerprint all the students in a first-grade class. “Getting all the parents’ permission was a lot of effort in itself, but have you ever tried to fingerprint a bunch of first graders?” Burnette said. His honors student analyzed, documented and recorded each set of prints and at the end of the project parents were given sets of their child’s fingerprints. “It was not only an expanded learning project for my CJ student, but now those parents have a valuable identification source of their children,” Burnette said.

In fingerprinting of another kind, chemistry honors student Stacey Sprague of Cullowhee told the group about her project in DNA. “I found genetic modification to be the most interesting and progressive use of DNA. I think it’s also interesting that even though it seems like standard procedure on today’s crime scene television shows, DNA fingerprinting really didn’t come about until the late 1980s,” said Sprague, who was so inspired by the project that she’s decided on a career in chemistry.

“Since we initiated the honors program last year, we’ve had 28 students- across all disciplines- participate,” said SCC Director of Student Support Services Cheryl Contino-Conner, who said she was impressed by the caliber of the students. “Ninety percent of these students are making A’s,” she said.

An added benefit to SCC’s honors students, she said, is the smooth transition to Western Carolina University’s Honors College.

For more information on SCC's honors program, contact Contino-Conner at 586-4091 extension 245 or email Cheryl@southwesterncc.edu.

Lunch for the honors meeting was donated by Zaxby’s of Sylva.

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