Best of
Florida Schools 2003
General Categories—Page
16 (Web-Only)
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Best Honors Residence Hall
Hume is
Where the Heart Is
Wouldn’t you like to
just fall out of bed, head downstairs, and go to class—all without ever
leaving your dorm? This has become a reality for
University of Florida
Honors Program students who can live in the new Honors Residential College
at Hume Hall. It’s the first facility in the nation designed and constructed
with the needs of Honors students in mind.
The $17 million project spans 167,000 square feet and houses 608 students who were accepted into the Honors Program as freshmen. To be invited to join the program, students must have a 3.9 GPA on a 4.0 scale and a 1350 SAT or equivalent ACT score when graduating high school.
“The new Hume Hall truly is a community of students with similar interests,” says Dr. Shelia Dickison, associate provost for undergraduate education and director of the Honors Program. “Two classrooms and faculty offices allow students to learn where they live, and the Student Honors Organization does a great job of providing social and service activities.”
In addition to regular dorm amenities such as laundry, kitchens, and lounge areas, the residence hall includes two multimedia-capable classrooms, a commons building, small-group study space, a large activity room, a 24-hour information desk, an Honors Council office, and spaces for tutoring and academic advising. “As one of the Hume residents told me shortly after moving in, ‘Hume is where the heart is!’” Dickison says. —JB
Contact Dickison at doctord@ufl.edu or visit the honors program at www.honors.ufl.edu.
Best
Nurses
Giving
Birth To Excellence
“Miss Scarlett, I
don’t know nothing about birthing no babies,” says Prissy in Gone With
the Wind. Her famous line echoes true for most people. Thankfully, the
University of Florida’s College of Nursing has formed a nurse
midwifery master’s degree program that recently received the highest
accreditation from the American Colleges Nurse Midwives. Every year this
program produces enough qualified midwives to ensure others like Prissy will
not have to deliver any babies on their own.
While some people may think midwives only are there when babies are born, “Nurse midwives are trained to take care of women throughout their lifespan, from newborn care to menopausal care,” says UF Interim Clinical Coordinator Alice Poe.
Midwives provide care to women,
whether it’s women’s health, treatment for a primary care problem, or
pregnancy, labor, and birth. “I work with the couple, or the woman, to
ensure that she’s as healthy as she can be and the baby’s as healthy as the
baby can be,” Dr. Poe says. “And that during the birth process, the mother
can make choices, and as long as those choices are safe choices, I try to
support them. Most of us really love what we do. It’s really rewarding to be
helpful to women and families, especially when they’re having children.”
—RGM
Contact Poe at poeah@nursing.ufl.edu, visit UF’s Nurse Midwifery website at con.ufl.edu/msn/Midwifery.html, or call 1-800-MIDWIFE.
Best Hope
UNF Gives
Hope Wings
What if it were possible to make hope tangible? We could save it for some
future desperate occasion, or better yet, dispense it to all those in need.
It may not be possible to bottle hope, but the University of North
Florida’s journalism department has created a close second.
Created by journalism professor Paula Horvath-Neimeyer, the Hope Fund is a joint effort between UNF, The Florida Times-Union, and Volunteer Jacksonville to help struggling Jacksonville families during the holiday season. For the past nine years, Horvath-Neimeyer’s students in “Applied Journalism” have written articles on local families that have fallen on hard times. Then during the holiday season, The Florida Times-Union runs an article along with photos and a donation card each week on the front page.
Volunteer Jacksonville takes 100 percent of the money donated and disperses it to 40 area community-service agencies. With a running total of over $166,000 donated just this year and $1.2 million over the past nine years, the Hope Fund helps 800 families each year. “We stress that the families we write about are representatives of hundreds of families that have been submitted to the Hope Fund,” Horvath-Neimeyer says.
The Hope Fund uses donation to help with families’ basic needs—food, clothing, bills, and beds. Generally, the Fund gets cash, but Horvath-Neimeyer says it has also received bigger items such as mobile homes, cars, computers, and wheel chairs. “The students get a realization of how they as writers can affect change,” she says. “We in the media tend to overtime think that we’re not having an affect on anyone, but indeed, we do have great power to influence.” —JL
Contact Horvath-Neimeyer at phorvath@unf.edu, or visit www.hopefund.org.
Best Honors
Council
UWF Service Earns an A+
What types
of activities do honors groups hold? Chess tournaments, math-bowls, and
pocket-protector making? Not quite—the Honors Program and Council of the
University of West Florida is out to prove that they’re about more than
just academics.
The organization’s service committee plans projects such as volunteering for "Pensacola’s Promise", an offshoot of the national "America’s Promise", and raising money for "Up Till Dawn", a charity for cancer patients based at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. These so-called “geeks” and “bookworms” aren’t afraid to get out and get their hands dirty either with events such as a beach clean-up, "Adopt-A-Highway", and a Habitat for Humanity building day. The students of the honors program complete 10 percent of the entire university’s service hours.
The social committee gets wild and crazy planning events such as pie-eating contests, pizza nights, holiday parties, freshman cookouts, and movie nights. Once a month, the students plan a social after a special class that all honors students are required to take.
As if this weren’t enough, the Honors Program also puts out a newsletter, Infinite Wisdom that recently won first place in Chicago at the National Collegiate Honors Council newsletter competition.
“The Honors Program and the student-run Honors Council endeavors to provide students at UWF with an enhanced education and additional academic and social opportunities,” says David Walden, assistant director. “We feel that, given all of the commitments students have to keep along with their studies in today's world, our responsibility is to help nurture their development and make their lives as college students more whole, more meaningful. So, we try to do this by giving them every opportunity to succeed.” —EG
Contact Walden at 850-857-6403.
Best
National Service
Serving
at a Higher Level
Being a semester away from graduation gives you plenty to think about: final
exams, resumes, job searches, grad school. And when you’re the University
of West Florida’s Student Government Association president, you’re even
busier.
But all these things took a back seat for Jason Crawford, senior in finance and SG president, when he got the call on December 26, 2002 to serve his country. Crawford, who served two years active duty in the Army prior to college, knew his commitments as a National Guard reservist outweighed his campus commitments and personal timetable. “He went without doubt or hesitation,” says his stepmother Dana Crawford. “His training has been going on the whole past month—he only had a weekend off in January.”
Having served in the infantry in Korea and Bosnia before becoming a student, much of Crawford’s leadership training came from Uncle Sam. At UWF, he served as first treasurer and then two-time president of his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, before running for the highest student office on campus. “He’s really laid-back and approachable,” says Joe Rieland, Crawford’s vice president now serving in his stead. “He has no problem getting on a mike and getting students enthused. He’s really good in front of large crowds; he thrives on that.”
With only 13 days notice before he had to leave for Ft. Stuart, Georgia, Crawford had little time to deal with his personal and campus matters. “He was disappointed about having to give up being SGA president, but he said he has complete confidence in his vice president, Joe,” Dana Crawford says.
“I was lucky under the circumstances because he set the bar for me so that I could do the best job I can,” Rieland says. “He taught me a lot. I’m enjoying it, but it’s not something you hope for, under these circumstances.” Rieland even joked that Crawford might be able to get out of active duty because of his position. “Jason took that really seriously and shot that down immediately,” he says. “He was saying that there were people with kids being deployed, and being a student, it was easy for him to go. I think that showed the true test of him.”
Even Crawford’s New Year’s Eve was taken up with being a sergeant, not a student. “He had guard duty on New Year’s Eve before he left,” says his stepmom. “But hopefully, they can get over there, get business taken care of, and get back here in a hurry.” —SRR
Contact Crawford at jcraw23@yahoo.com.
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