Sixteen students inducted into Cum Laude Society
Eight seniors and eight juniors were officially welcomed into the Cum Laude Society this morning at a special assembly.
As part of the induction ceremony, Leigh Greden ’91, executive director of government and community relations at Eastern Michigan University, offered students five specific suggestions on how to pursue excellence: realize that the pursuit of excellence never ends, learn from your mistakes, be nice to people, continually strive to improve your writing skills, and do what you enjoy.
The bottom line, he emphasized, was not to focus on material success.
“Many are inclined to judge your success by how much money you make,” he told students. “But I urge you to take a broader view and define success for yourself, based on your own life’s goals and your own strengths and talents.”
The newest Cum Laude initiates from the Class of 2013 are: Lang DeLancey, Allyson Hogikyan, Jonathan Liu, Jacob Oestreich, Benjamin Pan, Lalitha Ramaswamy, Mithun Saha, and Emily Wu. These seniors join the following classmates who were inducted last spring: Henry Aspegren, Nadia Azad, Christina Bartson, Chang Che, Jonathan Lazarsfeld, Florence Rivkin, Davis Vorva, and Madison Vorva.
Members of the Class of 2014 who were inducted include: Sena Duran, Andrew Gitlin, Francesca Lupia, Jane Mortell, Kaitlyn Mussio, Antonia Piedmonte-Lang, Stephanie Uduji, and Minna Wybrecht.
The Cum Laude Society was founded in 1906 by Dr. Abram Harris, director of the Tome School in Maryland, to honor academic excellence at the high school level, much like Phi Beta Kappa does at the collegiate level. The main criterion for student membership is academic excellence and only schools that exemplify a strong commitment and ability to help young people achieve that degree of scholarship are granted charters. It is also hoped that initiates model the three virtues of the motto: honor, justice, and excellence. By-laws of the society state that each chapter is allowed to induct up to 20% of a class total, by the end of the senior year. The first 10% of these may be inducted during the second half of the junior year.
In this, our thirty-third year, we have now inducted a total of 408 students since first becoming a chartered chapter in 1981.
