Description of Honors Conference at Iowa State U., April 2003

(David speaks)

Making notes to bring home

Finally. I am sitting in a guest room in the Memorial Union on the campus of Iowa State, typing in a laptop. This is the start of our conference notes. SCSU Honors senior Mynul Khan, who is sharing this room with me, figured out how to plug everything in, and I ran down to the bookstore in this building and bought a floppy so we could save our notes. Tearing open the cellophane wrapper of the floppy was almost the final technological barrier to keeping notes. We almost had to drive back to St. Cloud for a pair of fingernail scissors. But my teeth prevailed, so we're still here.

Conference notes are a way to share what we learn here with folks back home in our program. And so they are a condition I insist on with the students who come with me to honors conferences.

Nicole Alexander, a first-year Honors student from SCSU, whose room is across the hall, has also been warned about making notes. (She would have had to split her room with two other students, but they bailed at the last minute.) How cool is this, that besides a food court, a bar, a computer lab, conference rooms of all sizes, and lots of great artwork, their student union has rooms in it, like a hotel? It's a huge sprawling building from the 1930s, with lots of American decorative touches from that period.

It's almost lunchtime, but maybe I can sketch a little in the next few minutes. Nicole and Mynul are elsewhere: I think Nicole is attending a presentation and Mynul is off to find ISU's Computer Science Department.

We hit the road

Our attendance this year, here in Iowa, got started when Rachel Luthi and Amber Bussman, two of our club's officers, began pressing me: wasn't there some kind of meeting coming up that Beverly had mentioned? I reacted the same way I always do to pressure: I put a GA on the case. So Naresh Keswani put out information to our students by email and arranged for conference registration, overnight stays, a state car, and...this laptop! Amber learned, to her disappointment, that if she had known about the dates sooner she could have arranged to go.

The three of us who ended up going—Nicole, Mynul, and David—met at Miller just before noon and stood around the state car in the ice storm trying to figure out how to get the !@#$%^& trunk open. Finally we took off. We cranked up the heat to clear the windows and thaw ourselves out, but soon we were driving south into Iowa's springtime. It was in the mid 50s when we finally got here, and by then it had dawned on us to turn off the car heater. The next day the Iowa campus was covered in sleet and snow.

We had also had an exciting hunt for a gas station in a Tiny Iowan Town That Time Forgot. The gas station owner would not take the special State of Minnesota gas credit card. It was Mobil station. Nope, he would not take a Mobil credit card, either. He wouldn't take any credit card. I wrote him a check. The man was nice enough; he filled our tank himself, and told us a shortcut back to the freeway. The twentieth century will catch up to him eventually.

Driving down in the car, I attempted to teach Nicole and Mynul the song about Iowa from the musical comedy The Music Man. I figured it was essential background for the sophisticated traveler. My efforts were only slightly hampered on account of not really knowing the song myself. I also turned out to be just a bit dim on the "Iowa Waltz."

Once the hilarity from that one subsided, Mynul explained to me the basics of his conference presentation on computer science. (He had contacted the conference organizers in advance and got accepted to the program.)

We choose two foci to watch for at the conference

Once Nicole woke up in back seat, we three also talked about the two issues facing our program that I most hoped we would find out about from other programs here. One was to revive participation in the Honors Club. The club officers have done a great job with programming, certainly the equal of past honors officers in years when the club was thriving. But attendance is still terrible. So I don't think programming is the problem, or rather it's not the solution. At the conference we actually did go to two presentations on honors student organizations, each followed by discussion, and spoke informally with students and faculty.

In notes below, I'll call these our two "car questions": (1) how to revitalize the club, and (2) how to initiate and maintain a senior seminar without adding to graduation requirements. (In my mind it is not a done deal that we will do the latter. I still need to consult with students, faculty, and administration. I hope that includes lots of people reading this. Also, both concepts evolved once we got there and began listening to discussion among students and faculty from other programs

Impressions of the Ames campus. Conference activities.

Iowa State, America's oldest land grant university, is a sprawling place, a comprehensive university with a heavy emphasis on science and technology. There are charming old-campus touches, like a campanile tower, a little lake with swans, and a mishmash of older building styles, some gracious and some just ostentatious and university-clunky. Beyond that part of campus are blocks and blocks of research labs, some in large buildings, others in greenhouses...they have a cutting edge lab just for pure crystalline metals. They have their own virtual reality tour of the campus. They have their own agronomy building. I don't even know what agronomy is. I think it's a common athletic injury.

We arrived in time to register before dinner. (Notes to myself: next time bring a coat and tie for the first evening. The level of dress is really mixed at these things, but the first night is supposed to be a bit special. And get there in time for the reception, so we can take time to meet a few people and register before the banquet.)

After dinner we elected state reps, student and faculty, to the regional council. Mynul and Nicole had no interest what. so. ever. in attending the state caucuses. I think it takes a while before you get drawn into regional and national participation in honors. And I sure was not up for volunteering for regional involvement. Frankly, I think I need to focus hard on our program, on our campus, for a time yet.

And yet...I did volunteer us to host UMHC three years from now. Why? Well, it's been our turn for some time now. And it will be exciting to help plan it. Freshmen reading this will be seniors that year, and there'll be lots of room to help shape the conference and put it together. I think it will be a point of pride for us, and really spark our own program.

Right after dinner Mynul's radar led him to the candy machines. Lord, how does that young man stay so thin?

Next up was an address by the actual Dr. Science, the public radio comedian who founded the Duck's Breath Mystery Theater. His schtick is arrogant, ignorant pseudoscience. The guy has a wit. And he does love to insult people. He even had a cynical diagnosis of how all you good-doobies ended up in honors. He appears to be from Iowa; I saw him later around the conference.

Mynul thought we should have a camera and bring back some photos, so in the student union I bought a disposable, which we never used. The weather was so...gray the whole time. Anyone want a disposable camera? (Note to myself: let's have the Honors Program buy a digital, so we can always put pictures together with text up on the Honors web page.) So far we haven't taken any pictures.

Back in our room, Mynul prepped his presentation. In the bar downstairs, I chatted with other directors and found out some things. For one thing, there is an easy way to put questions about honors out on a program directors' listserv, so I think I will pose our same two "car questions" to a much wider pool of national honors experience once I'm back in St. Cloud.

The next morning, breakfast was set out in ISU's brand-new Honors building. It's wonderfully charming, a contemporary prairie style revival, two story office-classroom-study-meeting-lounge place. Honors had previously been in an endearing but rundown "cottage;" then they were in a basement for a year while this one was being built, and they frankly wanted to show it off to us. It's open 24 hours to honors students, by key. During the day I went up to the second floor offices, which are also now the headquarters of the national honors organization (National Collegiate Honors Council, or NCHC). Got some questions answered there. Nice staff.

That got Mynul to thinking about our space in Centennial: couldn't we have a study lounge, he wondered? I added that it could double for Honors Program and Club meetings, small seminar-style classes.... Well, since Honors is due for a permanent home in Centennial, I'm supposed to meet with the architect. So yes, I'll bring this idea up. No promises. I'll push for it as best I can, maybe cite examples of Honors programs that have their own buildings, and argue that we should take an affordable step in that direction. (Note to myself: add this to advisory committee discussion notes.)

The conference included so much interesting student work that we went to papers that were not about "car questions" at all. And yet the three of us managed to double up on two presentations on student groups, one by Drake and one by SDSU. The latter had active floor discussion afterwards. In both cases the student organizations they described were complicated, and were tied in complex ways to their related honors program's operations. Not everything they do would work for us. In this web page, go click on the notes we brought back from the conference on ideas for our Honors Club.

Research with students: a model for our program?

After breakfast we wandered through a room of poster presentations, as they're called, which are conference presentations you walk by and peruse.

But we were anxious to hear Mynul's presentation. Nicole and I kidded him that we were going to murmur, "Good point!" and "This is brilliant stuff!" at intervals. But seriously, it was a good, clear presentation, accessible for the newcomer and yet with enough technical depth to interest computer students. Imagine you are trying to program a computer to recognize words in human speech. The program has got to group some sounds together as similar, and separate others as dissimilar. Pretty formidable problem. But under that technical layer is a basic computational problem of how to most efficiently sift a data set into two piles based on an arbitrary sort of similarity. Unless you do it swiftly, the sheer sifting algorithm could take hours. Days. Centuries. You see the point. Mynul presented some research he'd done with Sarnath Ramnath, one of our CSCI faculty, in which algorithmic speed is obtained at the cost of massive scratch-work storage. But that seems a good tradeoff in today's computing world. Practical applications of similarity sorting are potentially immense, and are right-now technology.

This faculty research mentoring relation has a lot more in common than I saw at first with the potential for our Honors Program and the "car questions" we brought with us. Again, in this web page go click on the notes we brought back from the conference on ideas for a senior seminar.

Winding down, going home

I'm finishing this at night. Mynul is conked out. He and Nicole have both written their notes. After Mynul went to a session on grad school, we all went to dinner in downtown Ames. Neither student cared to contribute carloads of cash to a carpeted, cornball, candle-lit cholesterol cave. So we ate at Arby's, where at least the cholesterol is cheap. Turns out Nicole craves Arby's. Seemed like a pretty "arby-trary" choice to me, but then I don't decide everything. Anyway, we talked for a while, grabbed a pretty decent meal in no time, and headed back to the Union for separate, restful evenings. All three of us skipped the broomball game where conference participants were invited.

Friday night: the student union is the site of a teen dance, sponsored by a university organization. Jillions of hormone-driven munchkins flying about tryin' to look good to the beat of somebody local and, uh, loud.

Tomorrow the conference is done. We will hear science presentations on genetic modifications and an undergrad chemistry research group called SCUM. Perhaps it stands for Society of Chemistry Undergraduate Majors. Or maybe these young chemists have modified themselves into scum. We'll find out in the a.m.

Saturday morning: yes, the presentations were amusing and informative. Mynul and Nicole voted to stay and hear them. But since I was tired—David—from staying up late doing these notes, and since I had to drive, I went back to the room and slept. Turns out the student union is dead, dead, dead on Saturday morning, far deader than Atwood. Nothing is open. No food. No books. Nothing.

We left by noon and were home before five. Relaxing drive.

It was a great conference. But do you know, Minnesota is lots prettier than Iowa?