Honorary Magazine 2018-19

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Facing Failure: A Year of Learning From Mistakes was an exciting theme for us to choose this year. While we were a little worried about how a year of failure would look on an Honors bumper sticker, it felt like the perfect choice. The theme came about in two ways. First, during our senior exit interviews, Connor Phu told us about an abandoned Honors contract project in which he had attempted to cre- ate a living biodome ecosystem in a terrarium in his dorm. In the end, everything died, and it became a rotting, stinky mess as so many things do in dorm rooms. He related this story as a failure and regret- ted that he had to start over with a new project as a result. Both Dr. Ferguson and Dr. Pearson were struck by this and felt that although everything died, it was still a successful and exciting project. They wanted students to feel they had the space to try and fail and learn through the process. Not every- thing should have to work the way we hope it to for it to be a success in Honors. The second impetus came from our Spring 2018 colloquium that was fo- cused on mental health and fears. In a survey dur- ing the event, we discovered that nearly the entire College listed “failure” as one of their biggest fears. We took that as a sign that we should dive in to that this year and look at failure at both an individual and a systemic level.

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HONORARY 2018 - 2019