Leadership and Global Competency
The global leaders of tomorrow are in the Honors College today!
This short sentence captures the mission of the Honors College at WSU. Honors graduates have a long and distinguished record of leadership at the local, state, national, and global levels. For example, Amanda Porter, a 2001 Honors graduate in zoology and Spanish, is now a Foreign Service officer in Zimbabwe. Her Honors thesis experience was the catalyst that changed her life and sparked her interest in Foreign Service as a career. (See the most recent edition of our magazine, "Excellence," on this Web site.)
The vision of the Honors College is our plan for accomplishing this goal. The new Honors College curriculum, which is being implemented this year after four years of discussion and deliberation, provides foundational knowledge to assist all of our graduates in their understanding of the increasingly “flat world.” Professor Fernando Reimers, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, suggests that the most critical challenge in education today is to provide students with a global education – including a positive disposition toward cultural difference, extensive knowledge of global topics such as health, climate change, and economics, and an ability to speak foreign languages at an advanced level. The Honors College curriculum includes each of these components. It was designed to engage our students with multiple international issues and ensure that each would develop an intermediate level of proficiency in a second language.
The new curriculum, in conjunction with the Honors College’s strong commitment to study abroad and undergraduate research, provide our graduates with the tools required to assume leadership in both the private and public sectors. The continued interest and financial support of our generous donors make it possible for us to continue this very important work.
--Libby Walker, Ph.D.
Honors College Interim Dean
posted 11/07/08