Vice President of Scholarship
I had the unique opportunity to act as Vice President of Scholarship for my fraternity, Sigma Phi Epsilon (\(\Sigma \Phi \text{E}\)), at Missouri University of Science and Technology. The role of VP Scholarship was to oversee the academic progress of my fraternity brothers and provide academic support to those in need. Going into my position, I thought hard about the hindrances to academic success in engineering. Missouri S&T is primarily a science and engineering university. Thus, every student on campus is required to take the same core engineering courses, namely: Calculus I, Calculus II, Trigonometry, College Algebra and General Chemistry. Research has shown that the main obstacle to success in engineering is an initial failure to grasp these core subjects. In order to boost the success of my fraternity brothers, I developed an academic initiative which I aptly named the Sigma Accelerator Program. For this program, I personally developed practice tests, lead tutoring sessions before exams, created a fraternity-wide academic support system and academic mentoring initiative, and monitored the individual progress of students. The instillation of this program not only resulted in increased retention of students in engineering after the first year, but excelled students’ progress in their individual fields. After the first year of the Sigma Accelerator Program, my fraternity displayed the highest overall grade-point average on campus, among 22 fraternities and sororities. Additionally, the outstanding achievement of this program was noticed by the fraternity’s national governing organization. This contributed to my chapter being awarded the highest recognition offered by the national organization, the Buchanan Cup.
My role in the Sigma Accelerator Program provided a great opportunity to practice planning and implementing a successful academic initiative. I was very encouraged by the progress of my students and I hope for more teaching opportunities in the future!