What are the Hallmarks?

“One of the qualifications for being a five star chapter.”

By Heebeom Yang

Phi Theta Kappa International Honors Society (PTK) is an organization which promotes higher academic achievement. PTK implements five star membership for chapters which depends on members’ achievements in terms of scholarship, fellowship, and leadership. Our responsibilities and duties as active chapter members is to maintain our chapter’s 5-star rating.

                Our chapter implements a College Project and Honors in Action (HIA) event in order to qualify as a 5-star chapter. Our Alpha Phi Theta chapter has been working on the Honors in Action, a research project, since last June. The purpose of the HIA project is to define a problem and find an answer to it. In order to conduct research we used the Honors Study Topic booklet to choose a main topic. Throughout the summer we did research on the chosen topic and organized an event to share our research findings with the college community; the event was titled “College Rankings…do you know?” The purpose of this event was to inform students about the college ranking systems. Most students just base their transfer choices on higher ranked universities or colleges due to those college’s reputations and rankings.  We wanted to correct this habit; therefore, we emphasized that college rankings don’t represent the only way how our academic journey can be successful. Our guest speaker, Ms. Benetta Parson led a discussion about the rankings systems at the end of the event.

                Once the event was complete, we had to write a Hallmark essay on the whole project. We collected research and survey data to use in writing about the outcomes of our project for the Hallmark essay. During the writing process, I learned many things in terms of team work and communication skills for building better relationships.