---
layout: post
title: "Lessons from Solitude"
tags:
 - Education
 - Personal Development
image:
  path: /assets/img/posts/nchc/barrett_delegation.jpg
  alt: >
    The six students representing Barrett, The Honors College at the 2021 National Collegiate Honors Council. (Back Row: Elora Bevacqua, Jaclyn Fishbach, Arianna Tillman) (Front Row: Alex Gilchrist, Joseph Hale, Anika Islam)
redirect_from:
 - /2021/11/10/nchc.html
---

> Personal reflections on the 2021 Conference of the [National Collegiate Honors
Council](https://www.nchchonors.org/) in Orlando, Florida.
{: .prompt-info }
 

For most of the last two years, the world has been forced to accept solitude.
While a challenging change of pace for a highly extroverted world, this forced
solitude has enabled widespread reflection on how to improve the institutions
and structures in our societies. According to [Susan
Cain](https://susancain.net/), the acclaimed author of [Quiet: The Power of
Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking](https://youtu.be/c0KYU2j0TM4),
such solitude is the source from which "most great ideas spring" because it
provides the time and space required for creativity and imagination. As such, it
is relevant that this year's conference of the National Collegiate Honors
Council encouraged a re-imagination of the collegiate honors experience across
the country by providing time and space for academics across the country to
share the challenges, ideas, and successes they have experienced through these
last two years of relative solitude. With that understanding, I sought to
discover the best ideas on three topics: personal time management, honors peer
mentoring, and effective support systems for students working on an honors
capstone experience like a thesis.

By paying close attention to the personal stories of the many highly
accomplished people who presented at the conference, I learned that a
foundational principle of effective time management is to focus on only those
activities in which one can be fully invested. One of these people was [Dr. Thao
Do](https://www.linkedin.com/in/thaocoach/) who, in just 15 years, has excelled
in the diverse industries of mechanical engineering, biomedical research,
marketing, law, and aviation by being "all in" on her vision of creating and
distributing solutions to a variety of worldwide problems. Notably, she did not
attempt to master all five of these varied industries at once, rather she moved
from one to the next as her greater mastery of the one revealed a need to better
understand the next. For example, she decided to pursue biomedical research to
learn how nature solved mechanical problems and apply nature's solutions to
solve new problems with machinery. Similarly, during the conference's opening
keynote, [Thomas Riddle](https://twitter.com/thomasriddle_ii), made it obvious
that one's hobbies and personal passions can be synergistically integrated into
his/her professional work as he described how he used his personal love of Star
Wars and Indiana Jones to inspire a completely new set of engaging school
curriculums. By taking a closer look at the motivations behind these and other
extraordinary accomplishments I saw that there was no "secret formula", rather
each of these amazing individuals found a way to link their personal interests
to their professional work. As such, "time management" simply consisted of
focusing on those personal interests and applying them in meaningful ways.

![](/assets/img/posts/nchc/kathryn_thornton.jpg)
_Meeting [Kathryn Thornton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_C._Thornton), one of the NASA astronauts who fixed the Hubble Space Telescope._

This principle of deliberate focus also carried into the forums focused on ideas
for improving honors peer mentoring. When discussing how different colleges pair
mentors and mentees, the shared guiding principle was the question "Who will
best provide a meaningful personal relationship with the mentee?". Even though
each college took a different route to answer that question (e.g. matching based
on major/interests, letting students pick their mentors, paying mentors so they
would dedicate more time, etc.), by the end of that discussion we all felt that
a deliberate focus on the ways that mentors could form meaningful relationships
with their mentees was paramount to a mentoring program's success. From there,
other ideas like establishing a group of alumni mentors for juniors and seniors,
simplifying all honors leadership applications into a single form, and providing
training on disability/counseling services served as implementation details for
achieving the overarching vision of creating meaningful relationships.

These attributes of an effective mentoring program were also reflected in the
forums focused on finding effective ways to support students through a
culminating honors experience like a thesis. For example, the University of the
Incarnate Word took the mentoring principles literally by creating an alumni
mentor group for juniors and seniors that included a focus on the long-term
impacts of the thesis experience on the alumni's professional career. In
contrast, Northern Arizona University (NAU) and the University of Idaho focused
on sophomores by creating a 1-2 credit course that teaches scholarly/research
writing skills. For NAU specifically, their 1 credit course leads students
through the creation of a 10-page thesis proposal so that they have a
significant foundation for the full senior thesis. Then, representing more of a
middle ground, the University of South Carolina focused on creating a
mentoring-style relationship between the honors faculty and the senior students
through activities like meetings with an honors advisor early each semester that
would turn into more regular one on one breakfasts if the advisor felt like the
student was struggling more than normal. Though they varied in their specific
policies and decisions, each of these institutions first recognized the unique
challenges faced by honors students attempting to complete a major research
project for the first time and focused on providing personal, mentor-like
attention to encourage and teach those students along the path to eventual
success.

I am grateful to have attended this conference. The lessons were many, the new
friendships are amazing, and the overall experience was inspiring. As Barrett,
along with the rest of ASU, comes back to an integrated, in-person college
experience, I hope we can both remember these lessons and value the solitude in
which they were learned. I believe that by so doing we will be better equipped
to deliberately focus on the principles that foster the meaningful, personal
experiences that typify the honors experience.
