Liu, Simin. (2009). Honors Alumni Needed

As far as I am concerned, SAU Honors College is not fully involved in alumni affairs and development and doesn’t have an external advisory board. The reason for this is obvious, that it simply doesn’t have an external advisory board, and at least up till now I haven’t been introduced to any honors college alumni. To me, alumni are very important resources to an institution, because they can be models for current students, provide external connections, and make donations to the improvement of the university. Also, alumni can teach the current students things that can’t be learned in textbooks or at school, but only through real life experiences. In terms of this aspect, College of Business actually does a good job. I take American Enterprise in College of Business this semester. We have three classes a week, but usually only two of them are spent in class on the knowledge from the textbook. Instead of studying solely from the textbook, we watch videos of the success stories of different entrepreneurs and corporations, and listen to lectures given by alumni. Three weeks ago, shortly after we learned the term “entrepreneurship,” College of Business invited an alumnus who graduated in 2002 to tell us about his story. He told us about his graduate study at University of Arkansas, fast promotion as a manager in a company, and finally, bored with the long-distance travel from home to work, he decided to be his own boss. He elaborated on his experience as an entrepreneur, which to me was a much more vivid and correct explanation than whatever a dictionary or textbook gives. Besides, this month is the College of Business’ Professional Development Month. Many outside speakers are invited to College of Business to give lectures, which can be considered as a precious outside advisory resource. For example, the president of Bancorp South came to give a lecture last week. He gave a lot of savings advice and explanations of services provided by banks, which is very beneficial for college students to have a good awareness of money and savings. I feel this is quite important because some of my friends really don’t have a conception of money, which is horrible.

To be honest, as a current honors student, I’m pretty interested in the development of honors graduates. However, I know that Honors College is not a specialized college such as the College of Business, and it is hard to have an outside speakers introduce something that is beneficial to all the honors students in different majors. Still, Honors College can make efforts to have an alumni advisory board to introduce their experience in Honors College, and give advice in general career development that is important in their experience.