Honors College to offer new scholarships

Scholarship money can be difficult to come by for students, especially if the receipt of awards is dependent solely on their high school records.

But a new program will help students who may be worthy of a scholarship, though for various reasons did not receive one.

Pitt’s University Honors College Scholarship Program will award 40 scholarships, each worth $2,000 for tuition support, to students who have participated in the Honors College by taking honors courses, living in honors housing, serving as an Honors College ambassador or receiving any fellowships offered, among other activities.

Honors College Dean Edward Stricker said the program aims to recognize students who excelled in their courses but did not receive scholarship aid upon admission. He said the Honors College has previously given a small number of scholarships to undergraduates, but a recent availability of funds spurred the new program.

“Often, [students] were ‘late bloomers’ who were doing much better than anyone might have predicted from their high school credentials,” Stricker said in an email. “We could reward their development and accomplishments in college.”

A foundation, which preferred to remain unidentified, donated funds to the Honors College for this purpose, according to Gordon Mitchell, assistant dean of the Honors College. The Honors College invested the funds as endowment income and allocated interest from the endowment toward the scholarships.

Applicants must be junior, senior or fifth-year students who have completed a minimum of two full semesters at Pitt’s Oakland campus, possess at least an overall 3.5 GPA and have not obtained previous merit scholarships from Pitt’s Office of Admissions and Financial Aid.

Mitchell said in an email that the scholarships will “favor those students with outstanding track records at Pitt who have not yet received merit scholarship support.”

The program will also benefit students who transferred to the University or applied too late to be considered for a scholarship upon admission, according to the University Honors College website.

The Honors College Advisory Board, which consists of six members, selects which applicants will receive scholarships.

Two members represent each of the three divisions of the School of Arts and Sciences: humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Each year, the Arts and Sciences department faculty elect three new faculty members to sit on the Board for two-year terms.

Mitchell said the college decided to distribute 40 scholarships because it seemed the appropriate number to give for maximum effectiveness.

“We aimed for a sweet spot that spread award resources broadly, yet thick enough to make a real financial difference,” he said.

According to the Honors College website, the board will also consider applicants’ current academic performance, strength of required faculty recommendations and responses to application questions such as, “How has participation in the University Honors College enhanced your education and experience at Pitt?”

“We do want to award the scholarships to students who have had some connection with the UHC, but we’re giving the committee a lot of leeway in judging this matter, and, at the moment, it has not yet been decided how to weight the various selection criteria,” Stricker said.

More specific reasoning behind selection of awardees will be determined as applications are submitted.

Adam Leibovich, who currently sits on the Honors College Advisory Board, said the pending content of applications will determine the selection process.

“We will wait and see what we get,” Leibovich, an associate professor of physics and astronomy, said. “It’s hard to tell what we will see at this point because it’s the first year we are doing this.”

Although the scholarship will not grant the awardees funds for specific projects, Leibovich said Honors College students engage in many projects “all over the campus, in fields like English and history and urban development and engineering, to name a few.”

Mitchell said he hopes the scholarship program will turn into a “virtuous circle,” in which the program’s success provides avenues for its future development.

“With more students and faculty looking into the world-class learning opportunities … and success of the scholarship program encouraging more donations, it will enable us to provide more scholarships,” he said.

Stricker said he also hopes that the program will expand, but added that for the foreseeable future, the awards will likely remain at the same number and amount.

Maurine Greenwald, an Advisory Board member, noted that other scholarships are often awarded to freshmen upon admission based on their SAT scores, high school academic performance and letters of recommendation, but the Honors College Scholarship Program “hopes to attract applications from a wide range of creative, accomplished undergraduates,” Greenwald said in an email.

“I personally welcome this opportunity to recognize successful students while encouraging more students to take Honors College courses and participate in other [Honors College] activities,” she said.

The application deadline is Feb. 14, 2014. Applications can be downloaded on the University Honors College website.