My name is Mary Rose Scarpelli and I am a graduate from Johnson County Community College
and I graduated from Honors program and it started with college now which was a great
experience.
Um I was able to take college courses while in high school with really good intelligent
teachers that new what they were teaching and like I learned so much and I felt like
you know I've taken college class.
It wasn't as daunting to start college.
And it's something I'm proud of to which I think is really nice.
Like I, I graduated from JCCC with honors and maybe not everybody knows what that means
but I know the work and dedication that went into doing that.
And I started in the honors program from day one which I'm really glad that I did.
Um and I think that college now experience and time actually allowed me to focus on the
honors program and do it within two years.
Because the honors program does have you add a few courses to your time and to your associates
degree um so already having a few done made that a really easy transition.
The connections that I made because I think in high schools wasn't about the social connections
and even hear the focus is definitely on academics and growing as an individual.
I made some of the best faculty and friendships through the program.
I don't think I would have had the opportunity to have otherwise.
My favorite honors class what the honors forum I think.
It was with Andria Broomfield and it was really great; I just like, it really made me think
about how that stuff effects things and then I actually kind of took that and ran with
it in a contract looking at food and how um like migrants use food differently in my personal
family history so that was really nice with anthropology honors contract so.
I graduated from Johnson County Community College with my associate's degree uh in honors
and I went on to the University of Kansas and started working towards my bachelor's
degree there and I transferred in as a junior.
Like all my credits transferred because I worked very closely with the honors counselor
and made for sure all would um and so now I'm a successful like junior at KU who you
know I saved a ton of money to which is really nice.
But I was also able to like kind of get my footing under me before I ended up there and
really get that personalized teaching that you get here at JCCC and I think that's made
me all the more successful not that I'm at a four year university and I'm not behind
anybody else.
I'm right there with them competing like maybe even doing better because I see people who
struggled there first few years at KU and I didn't.
I had great experience here.
If you're thinking about joining the honor program you should.
You should be prepared to committee to like hard work and like putting in the extra time
because you do have to take some extra classes but at the end of it if you're involved and
you, you go all out it's totally worth it and I think you leave hear feeling like you
had a really great experience.
This summer I have a wonderful opportunity to Nicaragua um through KU with a study abroad
program to learn Miskito which is a native language to the Nicaraguan coast.
It's actually uh Indian language.
It's really cool and also I'll be doing my own ethnographic field research while I'm
there.
In the fall I'll be studying abroad in Cork College University which is in Ireland.
I'm just doing all my course work for that semester in Ireland rather than Kansas so
that's really exciting too.
And then I plan to graduate from KU in May of 2015.
Um and eventually I'd, I'd like to move our east and start doing some like apply and go
to graduate schools and get my graduates degree.
Um and I'm looking at focusing still in anthropology.
I'd like to focus in applied anthropology but with a big focus on women and gender studies.