Message from the Director – Summer 2024
Message from the Director – Summer 2024
I hope this newsletter finds alumni, family, and friends of the College
Scholars Program doing well. I write this as I am coming to the end of
my fourth year as director. Even though the first couple years of my
directorship were impacted by the pandemic, this position is still the best
job at the University of Tennessee, as former directors Jeff Kovac and Chris
Craig had indicated.
Without further ado, we have a lot to report in this issue.
It is very nice to be back to face-to-face interviews of applicants to the
College Scholars Program! It is also great to be able to recruit in person
again. We’ve tabled at Hodges Library (see photo on back) and have
begun meeting with advisors from different colleges at the university.
We celebrated the 50th anniversary of the College Scholars Program
2023—the oldest honors program at UT Knoxville! We held a celebration
at the UT Conference Center in spring. Former director of the program,
Jeffrey Kovac, was a key organizer for the 50th celebration and he wrote
an overview, which is published online at scholars.utk.edu.
My main way of interacting regularly with individual college scholars is
through our weekly seminar. Over the past few years, these seminars
have shifted over largely to professional development. We did this shift
primarily to increase the sense of community and networking among
College Scholars students and various units within the university that are
highly relevant to college scholars (such as College Scholars advisor Ali
Brewer—see online edition—and staff from Undergraduate Research and
Fellowships and from the Center for Career Development).
Based upon an idea of college scholar Amara Pappas, this academic year
we started to open the first 15 minutes of each seminar with a college
scholar talking about their program or study or plans for their senior
projects. Borrowing a phrase from Andy Warhol, we’ve been calling these
segments of each seminar our “15 Minutes of Fame.”
This spring we had our program’s first invited speaker through the
Jeffrey and Susan Kovac Visiting Scholar Endowment. Our speaker
was alumna and Alumni Advisory Board member Mary Anne Hitt. She
gave a wonderful and uplifting talk about her work leading climate and
environmental organizations and campaigns. We look forward to holding
these Kovac Lectures regularly and would love to get to the point where
we could have at least one such lecture each semester.
In this newsletter we catch up with three alumni of the program: Ashlyn
Anderson, Anne Buckle, and Jay Raman. We also welcome our newest
Alumni Advisory Board member, Joshua Maine—see online edition. We
thank Jay St. Clair, who stepped down from the board last spring, for all his
help over the years!
Because college scholars themselves are the raison d’être for the program,
we once again allot them plenty of pages in this newsletter!
Finally, although I am preaching to the choir here, College Scholars
students are among the very best at UT, as you will see from reading here
about the amazing work of many of the current students in the program.
This statement is backed up by the fact that, despite our program’s
small size, College Scholars graduating seniors regularly are selected as
Torchbearers—the highest honor UT bestows. In just the past three years,
six college scholars have been Torchbearers: Ashlyn Anderson and Taylor
Dempsey, 2022; Diego Lourenco, Emily Morgan, and Diba Seddighi, 2023;
Sarah Lange, 2024.
We would love to hear from you! Please keep in touch via email at
scholars@utk.edu or tfreeber@utk.edu, or call me at 865-974-3975.