he juvenile yellowfin tuna is darting back and forth so swiftly in its makeshift aquarium—a small bucket filled with saltwater—that Grant W. Brooks is beginning to wonder if he’ll ever catch it. With bodies shaped like spears and fins that can fold into grooves along their powerful torsos, yellowfin tuna are the Porsches of the sea, swimming at speeds of up to 4o miles per hour. Still, Brooks persists until finally he ensnares the creature. It is an early Tuesday morning at the Achotines Laboratory in Panama, and Brooks would like to complete his experiments on the use of anesthetics on Thunnus albacares before it is time to move on to his next project: an assessment of Eleuthera, Bahamas, as a future site for an offshore aquaculture facility. Indeed, such research endeavors would shine on the résumé of any college professor, let alone on that of a 21-year-old college student. But that is exactly what Grant Brooks is. Completing his senior year in the College of Arts and Sciences’ undergraduate Marine and Atmospheric Science Program, he graduated from the University of Miami in May with a dual degree in marine science and biology.

While Brooks stands as a symbol of tomorrow’s new generation of leaders, he also is a testament to students enrolled in the University of Miami’s Honors Program. Since its creation more than 25 years ago, the program has always been filled with the University’s best and brightest—students with near-perfect SAT scores, soaring grade point averages, and high school class rankings that go right through the roof. At the start of the fall semester of 2002, more than 1,600 students were enrolled in the program. It is designed to challenge them through smaller, more academically rigorous classes taught by tenured faculty. Membership in the program for incoming freshmen is by invitation only, and the requirements for acceptance don’t come easy: a minimum SAT score of 1350 and a ranking in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class. Current UM students and transfer students can qualify for the program with a grade point average of 3.5 and fewer than 60 total semester hours of credit. The average SAT score for the students in the program this year is 1408, which is 390 points above the national average.
 

Students such as these, says Benjiman Webb (M.B.A. ’85), director of the Honors Program and a professor of German in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, aren’t satisfied with the basic academic course offerings and demand classes that tap into their analytical abilities.

“These students are challenged at every step,” Webb says. “Faculty who teach honors courses don’t want to know what these students think; they want to know why they think what they think. This program exists to give them a challenge and a sense that we can rise to their needs and not the other way around. The worst possible thing that could happen for these students who are so motivated is to do undergraduate research and write a thesis they feel they have to dumb down to fit in.”

onors Program students are a mirror of the University’s diversity, with an enrollment of just about every ethnic group on campus. Females dominate, accounting for 998 of the 1,636 members, according to fall 2002 figures. More are majors within the College of Arts and Sciences than any other school or college. The School of Business Administration is next, followed by the School of Communication.

Nearly all receive scholarships of some type, and many win awards for study abroad. While there are no direct scholarships available through the Honors Program, the office coordinates and promotes nationally advertised awards such as the Truman, Marshall, Rhodes, and Fulbright scholarships. This year, the program hit a boon when 18-year-old Devi Sridhar won the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, which provides up to three years of study at Oxford University in England. Sridhar is the youngest American ever to win the award, which can count among its previous winners former president Bill Clinton and NBA Hall of Famer and former U.S. senator Bill Bradley. At Oxford, Sridhar will study for a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics, specializing in developing countries. “I want to work with the United Nations or World Health Organization to help bring basic health care to developing nations such as India and countries in Latin America,” says Sridhar, whose mother and late father moved to Miami from India in 1982.

If any student exemplifies the strength of the Honors Program, Sridhar does. A student in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Medical Honors Program, which fast-tracks freshmen to a medical degree in six years, Sridhar entered as a college junior because of all the Advanced Placement courses she took in high school. She speaks five languages, is an accomplished violinist and tennis player, has tutored autistic children, and written a book on Indian mythology. She has been accepted to UM’s School of Medicine as well as to Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, and Yale law schools.

With a 1430 on her SAT and a 4.3 weighted high school grade point average, Samantha Riepe of Orlando, Florida, could have had her pick of colleges. Similar to Sridhar, Riepe took several Advanced Placement courses in high school, and she already had 42 college credits before she even took her first step inside a UM classroom. She entered the Honors Program as one of 224 incoming freshmen to do so in fall of 2000. She is a double major in environmental science and print journalism, a resident assistant at Eaton Residential College, and works as a marketing and publications coordinator for the Department of Residence Halls. The Amazon Student Travel scholarship she received this year will send her to Peru this summer on a ten-day expedition down the Amazon River.

Tulane, Washington University, Rhodes College, St. Louis University, and Truman State all sent acceptance letters and scholarship offers to sophomore honors student Kayci Huff of St. Louis, Missouri. But Miami, she says, was the perfect fit. “I wanted a school that had a strong biology department, was academically challenging, and would provide me with a unique college experience,” explains Huff, a microbiology/immunology major who conducts mentored research on immunomodulators. “Miami offered all of this.”

The highlight of honors student Terence Buckley’s academic career here hasn’t been his classes but his job tutoring student-athletes for the Athletics Department. “It’s one thing to learn something through the University and go through the basic curriculum,” says the senior philosophy major. “Finding ways to get other students motivated to learn and getting them to understand is rewarding. It is probably one of the most important learning experiences I’ve had here.” Buckley is still awaiting word on a Fulbright to study Asian philosophy at the University of Hong Kong.

Honors Program director Webb says service outside the classroom such as Buckley’s is typical of UM honors students. Rajdeep Jolly, a senior philosophy major who hopes to go to law school after graduation, volunteered at the in-house radio station at Miami Children’s Hospital and completed an internship at the ACLU, where he helped homeless ex-felons get their voting rights restored.

esearch, often rare for undergraduates at other institutions, is another hallmark of many honors students. “Research can be an amazing and effective enhancement to an application for graduate school and medical school. It’s something that many of our undergraduates are demanding,” says Joyce Biederman, coordinator of the Office of Undergraduate Research, a division of the Honors Program, which last year secured mentored research internships for 135 undergraduates, not only honors students.

Because of the many outstanding freshman classes admitted to the University over the past few years, the Honors Program has seen its numbers grow. Today, students enrolled in the program represent 20 percent of the University’s total student enrollment, 10 percent more than what is typically accepted by a University policy. Indeed, the median SAT score for University of Miami students is 1220. Meanwhile, the average GPA is 4.0, and 55 percent of UM students were ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

“These are all very dramatic,” says Paul M. Orehovec (A.B. ’70, M.Ed. ’72), vice president of enrollments. “And we’ve been able to do this while maintaining a very diverse student body.”

Entrance requirements have been raised, but is another revision necessary to keep the program’s numbers down? Webb doesn’t think so. “Perhaps only a little tweaking,” he says.

“We are, along with every other major university, in competition for the best and brightest coming out of high school,” Webb says. “And it is important that we address the needs of not only those who are here for reasons of getting a degree as a means to something else, but also for those who want to grow academically.”