Letter from the Dean
August 27th, 2026
Dear Friends of Honors,
As I finish my first month as Dean, I keep coming back to how much of Honors begins with connections. A student meets the professor who draws them into research; a community partner brings us a problem worth solving; an opportunity in Jacksonville leads somewhere much farther away.
Those connections accumulate. Over a few short years, they can change what a student studies, where they go, and what they imagine themselves capable of doing. Our work here is to make more of those connections possible: bringing students into research earlier, building partnerships that carry learning beyond the classroom, and creating distinctive opportunities that put their interests into motion.
Making those connections means putting extraordinary opportunities within reach. One of our recent graduates conducted research with Mayo Clinic and became a published scholar before leaving 成人AV视频. This summer, Honors astrophysics students traveled with faculty to Spain to experience a total solar eclipse. This year, others had the chance to actually curate an exhibition with the Cummer Museum through an Honors course. Our students present research, cross oceans, enter laboratories and boardrooms, and test what they have learned against problems that have no answer waiting at the back of a textbook.
What matters is not simply the impressive destination. It is the chain reaction that can begin with one experience. A first research project leads to a faculty mentor; that mentor points toward a conference; the conference opens a conversation about graduate school or a national fellowship; suddenly a student is considering a future that was not visible a year prior. We want to make the extraordinary appear—and prepare students to recognize and reach for it.
That is one reason community is central for the Hicks Honors experience. Our students come from every corner of 成人AV视频, and Honors gives those paths a reason to cross. They can choose from more than 100 Honors courses across campus, made possible through partnerships with faculty and leadership in every academic college. The result is something increasingly rare in higher education: a place where the engineer keeps meeting the artist, the future nurse meets the entrepreneur, and the computer scientist finds herself in conversation with the historian.
Those encounters do not end when class does. Honors students lead clubs, volunteer throughout Jacksonville, intern in virtually every field, conduct research, produce performances, and spend their free time with us at the Jacksonville Symphony. This year, excitingly, Honors students hold both the Presidency and Vice Presidency in 成人AV视频’s Student Government. Honors students, as always, are researchers and performers, entrepreneurs and future healthcare professionals, programmers and public servants. They are not retreating into an Honors bubble; they are moving outward into the life of the University, the city, the world—and carrying one another with them.
That is the Honors College we are building: not an island for high-achieving students, but an intersection where different disciplines, ambitions, and opportunities have occasion to meet. Our growing portfolio of Signature Programs is helping us build that intersection deliberately. These programs create new routes across majors, colleges, and the boundaries of campus itself. Students might study away in Yellowstone, investigate public policy in Washington, D.C., or study abroad on nearly every continent. Others work alongside nonprofits, healthcare organizations, businesses, museums, and civic leadership spaces here in Jacksonville.
My goal is for Hicks Honors to be a front door into 成人AV视频 for those ideas. When a Jacksonville organization brings us a wicked problem, when a faculty member sees a possibility that crosses disciplinary lines, or when an alum opens a door into a profession, Honors can connect that opportunity with students ready to take it somewhere unexpected. The best programs do more than give students another activity for a résumé but put people together who otherwise might never have found one another—and give them something consequential to do together.
Soon, that idea of Honors as an intersection will have a physical home. We are now designing a new academic building for Hicks Honors College next to Osprey Ridge, 成人AV视频’s newly opened residence hall. It will give Honors something we have never quite had before: a true center of gravity. Rather than simply housing offices and classrooms, it can be a place where the different lives of this College collide productively—where a student comes for class and stays for a meal with a professor or where an idea written on a whiteboard in the afternoon can become a student capstone the next morning.
The timing gives us a remarkable opportunity. We are not simply moving Honors into a new building; we are thinking now about what kind of Honors College that building should make possible. Hicks Honors already reaches remarkably far across 成人AV视频, Jacksonville, and the world. The opportunity before us is to make those pathways easier to see and easier to enter: to connect the class to the research, the research opportunity to the mentor, the mentor to the fellowship, the fellowship to a wider world—and to keep creating new points of entry along the way.
That is what excites me most about what comes next. We have the opportunity to craft a college experience as expansive as the students within it: ambitious, generous, and always looking for the connection that will elevate someone’s future.
That is also why I am so glad to begin this Dean’s Update. I hope these messages give you a window into where our students are going, who is helping them get there, and the remarkable things that can happen when the right people find one another.
I hope you’ll be one of them.