Taking on Challenges
You will hear it often: honors students at SIUE are engaged. You might be wondering what that really means. It helps to pause for a moment and wonder what the word engagement means: ‘under pledge.’ If we go far enough back in the drift of language we learn that our word comes from a family of much older words that emerged out of the world of games—of bets and wagers. When we bet, we are ‘under pledge’ to honor our wager. Strangely, that helps us understand what it means when folks say that honors is an engaged community.
Honors students have made a wager that joining the program and participating in the community will pay dividends in the long run. By taking on the challenges of our core academic curriculum, they wager that their work and time will pay dividends in their broader academic, social and campus lives. We have seen this again and again. By leaping into the program’s curriculum, our students come out ahead; winning scholarships for post-baccalaureate education, founding clubs and leaving a better campus community behind for younger students.
At SIUE, honors students aren’t just participants of organizations and initiatives—they create them. In creating them, they push SIUE into the future, making it more resilient by adding to the array of opportunities in which to engage themselves, their peers, their teaching faculty and their communities intellectually, socially, professionally and civically. They have ‘gone long’ with SIUE. Honors engagement is the catalyst that transforms the fleeting into the enduring and unforgettable. And that unforgettable return takes many forms.
