Dukakis Honors Interns - Spring 2014

For the past two years the Dukakis Center has been offering special honors programming for high achieving ACT undergraduates.

The project was launched in September 2012, when Dr Maria Patsarika was invited to conduct a series of honors seminars for select incoming freshmen. The freshmen honors cohort attended bi-weekly seminars in their first semester, and were then offered the opportunity to undertake short-term projects in their second term.

For the 2013-14 academic year the honors program was modified slightly. Incoming freshmen were again invited to attend biweekly honors seminars with Dr Patsarika, while the sophomores who opted to remain in their honors group conducted sessions around the theme “learning to see the world around us” led by photographer Chryssa Nikoleri.

In the spring of 2014 the program changed radically. The freshman and sophomore cohorts were now given the option of following masterclasses in filmmaking and photography, which were open also to honors-calibre students in their junior and senior years; degree candidates from all majors were welcome, as were, in select instances, study abroad students.

The objective of the masterclasses was to have students produce a final project somehow relating to celebrations of fifteen years of Dukakis activities at ACT. The projects included an exhibition of photography on the local and European elections of May 2014; a documentary video on the Dukakis Center; and the preparation of an e-book featuring articles posted on Politis, the blog of the Dukakis Center. Another group of students worked on events management during the spring 2014 semester.

It is hoped that the honors project can be developed further to introduce a regular formative learning component into ACT’s degree programs, while encouraging academically ambitious students to make ACT their first choice for undergraduate studies.