The
ENDEAVOR Newsletter of the Oklahoma City University Honors Program
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Director’s Corner
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Class of 2023 Honors Cohort
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Student Spotlight
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Study Abroad Spotlight
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Friday Forums
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Pictured: Gold Star Building, home of the OCU Honors Program
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FALL TWENTY-NINETEEN | 2019
DIRECTOR’S CORNER elcome to the fall 2019 edition of The Endeavor, the semi-annual newsletter of the Oklahoma City University Honors Program. Whether you are a current student, alumnus/ae, faculty member, or other friend of the program, we appreciate your taking a few minutes to see what we’ve been up to this fall. In the pages ahead, you’ll meet our new first-year cohort, who began the program in August, and get to know some of our more advanced students through our spotlight sections. We also report on a couple of our Friday Forum presentations from recent weeks. A highlight of the fall semester is always our trip to the National Collegiate Honors Council annual conference, and this year was no exception. Four students joined Assistant Director Erik Heine and myself at the Sheraton Conference Center in downtown New Orleans for four days of workshops, presentations, sight-seeing, and terrific keynote speakers, including the incomparable Lynda Barry. As we turn our attention to the spring semester, we anticipate having the largest class of cum honore graduates in the history of the program. You’ll be able to learn more about their many accomplishments and future plans in our spring edition. Until then, thanks for checking in and please stay in touch! Karen Youmans, Ph.D. Honors Program Director
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CLASS OF 2023 HONORS COHORT Class of 2023 This past August, the Honors Program welcomed 46 new students representing a diverse array of majors and hometowns. The class of 2023 moved into school a week early to participate in honors orientation, which was planned and facilitated by a group of honors peer mentors. This is the fourth year of the honors peer mentoring program, and it has continued to be a huge success. This year, orientation consisted of informational sessions, a campus scavenger hunt, and team building at Escape OKC. Thank you to the peer mentors for planning such a successful orientation. Everyone in the Honors Program is excited to get to know the freshman class and wishes them a great first year!
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STUDENT SPOTLIGHT More than a Recital: Zoe Dongas Zoe is a junior music theater major from Nashville, Tennessee, and is a student of Dr. Kelly Holst. She is an active member of campus as she has started several organizations, such as the Catholic Student Association and Stars for Non-violence, and has been cast in several shows from “On the Town” to more recently “Zombies of Penzance.” Zoe gave her junior recital, along with fellow honors student Jordyn Younger, but gave her own style with her music selections. In her recital, Zoe played an original piece titled “on the blossoming of dualities” by OCU alumnus Mathew Campbell. This piece was not the typical piece for a vocalist as it also required a clarinet/bass clarinet (played by Hollis Taylor), a cello (played by Layne Rogers), and a marimba (played by Jackie Partida). Dongas reflected on her friendship with Campbell saying, “the Mathew set was definitely one of the highlights from my recital! I met Mathew during “On the Town” my freshman year and we’ve kept up ever since. Mathew’s piece was born out of a Classen Coffee conversation just before finals week last semester. He was about to graduate, and we were both bummed I couldn’t be in his grad comp recital because we’ve wanted to work on something new together. We got to talking about music we love and things we’re passionate about, and we realized my junior recital was the perfect opportunity for Mathew to be able to write something for me! The text of the first piece, “i. celebration,” is a quote of my answer to Mat’s question that was something along the lines of, “what sentence means something to you?” Zoe also performed a Spanish and Filipino set, saying, “it wasn’t until I did more digging into some academic papers that I realized how strong the societal connection between the two were. Though Cuba and the Philippines are very different places and very different cultures, they both share the unfortunate history of being colonized by Spain.” Dongas incorporated a guitar (played by Jackson Roberg) into her Filipino set, which was translated by her mom. This set was unique in the way that Zoe was able to convey the emotion behind each piece despite the language being unknown to the audience while also making the connection between the two different cultures.
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Zoe described her thankfulness, saying “In general, I’m so grateful I got the opportunity to work on music that I truly loved. Thanks to Dr. Holst, I had freedom in choosing the rep I sang. I got to dive into music that I was passionate about, which made all the difference.” She also credits her friend, roommate, and fellow honors student Sarah Schultz for her help with the recital, working as her stage manager. “Simply put, we should celebrate the amount of potential all of us behold. Perhaps in a newborn human, there is a singularity of pure energy that has the potential to explode in them to become extraordinary human beings. Pair this idea with the concept of dignity and we have the potential to change the world.” – Mathew Campbell on “celebration” from “on the blossoming of dualities.” Campbell’s note on “celebration” is a perfect description of the performance that Dongas gave in her junior recital and the meaning behind the performance that she gave, emphasizing her talent as a musician and intellect as a scholar.
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STUDY ABROAD SPOTLIGHT Study Abroad Spotlight: Loren Matrone Loren is a junior cell & molecular biology major. She is an active member of the campus committee and currently serves as Treasurer for Tri Beta (Biology Honor Society), the science and math senator in SGA, and a tutor in the LEC. While in England, Loren participated in an essay contest, contest name, and won! What are you career aspirations? I am a cellular and molecular biology major and I aspire to be a dentist. I will be applying to dental school this coming June, and I will be taking my Dental Admissions Test (DAT) this May. Since I was 17 years old, I knew I wanted to be a dentist, and every time I get to see a patient at the clinic I volunteer at, I am reaffirmed in my passion for dentistry. When I stepped foot on campus at OCU, I was determined to do everything I could to get into dental school, and that included my first two years being full of hard sciences. While deciding what classes to take at Cambridge, it would have been easy and comfortable to take science classes that I knew I would do well in. However, that was not what I was going to Cambridge to do. I was going to challenge myself academically. I have always been an avid reader, mostly of modern romance novels, but an avid reader nonetheless. I decided to take classes titled Reading Jane Austen and Literary London: from Shakespeare to Sherlock, and I am so happy that I did. I fell in love with Jane Austen’s atypical heroine Catherine in “Northanger Abbey,” and Virginia Woolf’s vivid descriptions of London in her essay “Street Haunting.” If it weren’t for Cambridge, I would have never discovered my love not only for reading literature, but studying it in an academic setting. I excel in science, and it is the basis for what I want to do in my career, but in a way, I think the development of my critical reading skills and my love for the characters that waltz the pages of novels make me a better science student. Most importantly, I believe that they will one day make me a better dentist. How has your college experience been enriched by this opportunity? To say that Cambridge and PKP changed my life is an understatement. I left the U.S. not knowing what to expect, and I came home having seen how big and magical the world truly is. When I arrived at Cambridge, where I didn’t know a single person, I pushed myself beyond anything I had ever experienced. I made friends with people from many different walks of life, I traveled to places that I believed only existed in my dreams, and I read novels that made lasting impacts on my heart. I went to Cambridge looking to become a better student, to study at the place where Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, and above all else to challenge myself at one of the best universities in the world. Looking back on my experience, I did all of the things I set out to do, but I left with so much more. Cambridge allowed me to look within myself and challenged me to be a better student, better friend, and most importantly a better person.
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What was the process like for the essay contest that you participated in? The program that I attended at Cambridge was the Pembroke-Kings Summer Program (PKP), and they hosted a series of contests throughout the six weeks we were there. There was a photo, video, and blog competition, and I was the winner of the PKP 2019 blog competition. During my time abroad, I blogged about my experiences and friendships as a part of my Honors scholarship, however, blogging was something that I had done before and thoroughly enjoyed. When I received my Honors study abroad scholarship, it only made sense that I would blog about my experience, and I was thrilled to find out that there was a blog competition through the program. My blog is featured on the PKP website, and I got to be involved with some of the promotional brochures for next year’s program. Winning the competition was so rewarding, however, writing about my time abroad and being able to reflect back upon it has been even more rewarding. What were some things you enjoyed from your trip? One of the best parts about my trip was getting to be a real student at the University of Cambridge, even if it was only for the summer, I still got to experience what life as a student at Cambridge is like. The city of Cambridge is bustling with energy and innovation, and the second I stepped foot on the campus I could almost feel the intellectual advancements being made there. There’s just something different about the air at Cambridge, and I just felt so lucky that I was breathing it. Not only did I have the summer of a lifetime getting to be a student at Cambridge, but I met some of the most incredible friends from all over the world. From California, to New York, and even all the way to Austria, I made friendships that will last me a lifetime.
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FRIDAY FORUMS This semester had several interesting Friday Forums that have become a staple of the Honors Program in the past few years. Some highlights of the forums this semester included OCU alumnus Kyle Wardwell, who just finished a two-year Fulbright Program in South Korea, a Study Abroad Panel featuring several honors students, and a panel discussion on the class Film and TV Music Analysis that highlighted four honors students and their original composition for their honors contract.
Fulbright Program: The Fulbright Program is a national program that allows students to travel to another country to work and live in different cultures. Kyle Wardwell taught in South Korea for two years, teaching English in schools while also learning about the culture there. Wardwell talked about his many experiences and some of the challenges that he faced in his time there, as well as his love for the culture. Kyle also provided insight for current OCU Honors students on how to apply and what the program actually entails.
Study Abroad Panel: This semester also included a conversation on various Study Abroad programs that honors students went on. The panel included Loren Matrone (BS cell & molecular bio junior), Emily Wollenberg (BFA acting senior), Kaylila Pasha (BFA acting junior), and Clara Foster (BS dance management senior). These panelists talked about their experience in England and Spain and what their respective programs entailed. Each panelist also answered questions on the common pitfalls of studying abroad and gave advice to students on how to find a program that works best for them.
Film & TV Honors Contract Presentation: Last semester in Spring 2019, four students (Zoe Dongas, music theater junior; Sarah Schultz, music theater junior; Jordyn Younger, music theatre junior; and Zac Zubia, music/premed junior) worked on honors contracts that supplemented their learning in the class Film and TV Music Analysis, taught by Dr. Erik Heine. Each student made a short film and wrote an original composition that accompanied their film. These students wrote in the respective style for their genres (Horror, Sci-fi, Romance, and Western) and followed examples from several film composers. Each film was shown and followed by a Q&A afterward.
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NCHC This past November, the 54th Annual National Collegiate Honors Council Conference was held in New Orleans, Louisiana. The theme of this year’s conference was “Disrupting Education.” Lynda Barry, a multi-talented artist, writer, editor, cartoonist, and associate professor in Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was this year’s plenary speaker. Anna Delony, economics senior, presented her research, “’The Greatest of Wrongs’: A Rhetorical Analysis of Narratives on the Death of Mangas Coloradas.” Kristen Olmsted, vocal performance sophomore; Grant Wilson, acting sophomore; and Zac Zubia, music/premed junior, served as student moderators for a variety of different panels and presentations, including conversations on mental health in honors programs across the U.S. Dr. Youmans, honors program director, served on a panel, “Scholars’ Semester in Oxford Meeting – Diverisity in the Honors Curriculum: Disrupting Normativity Carefully,” which explored the ways in which faith-based colleges and universities address diversity and how programs, such as our Honors Program’s LAS Mythic Journeys, disrupt normativity. All four students participated in the NCHC City as Text program, a half-day session in which students explore different areas of the conference city to learn about local culture. This year, students got the chance to visit numerous parts of New Orleans, including the French Quarter, the Garden District, Marigny, the Irish Channel, the Lower Garden District, and Moonwalk.
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