By Erik Squire

Hello to all you wonderful fellow SMCC goers. Sadly, Garrick Hoffman has departed from us. That is, he’s moved on to the Op/Ed pages as its new Section Editor. I am now the Section Editor for Campus News and I’m looking forward to my new job. With this position comes great responsibility; responsibilities like keeping the Campus Exposed article thriving and interesting. So with that being said, here’s to a great semester filled with exciting news!

In an interview I conducted with President Cantor, he talked about the specifics of his plan to retain successful students. He talked about one of SMCC’s new programs, one that should promote stronger connections between faculty and new coming students and therein create triumph. Here it is, straight from the man himself:

We’re doing a few pilot programs. One of them is the My Success Program with Portland public schools and we have a foundation that gave us some money this summer to support that program. We took a group, it’s a small group, but like I said it’s a pilot program. We took 16 students who just graduated from Portland public high schools and they spent two weeks here over the summer. They spent nights at the resident’s hall. Our faculty and staff got to know them. We did some intensive programs and support activities for them and we tested them at the beginning and at the end with the accuplacer. During a two week period many of them increased their level considerably in math, English and otherwise. Even more than we thought they’d increase. Now what we’re doing is keeping in touch with those students and following them through the semester. We should be able to track their progress and gauge how successful the program was.  

While we’re on the topic of turning out successful students, I also did an interview with Maisarah Miskoon, who is a 2nd year Liberal Arts student, and a PTK member. There is no doubt that PTK has played a hand in organizing students in a way that is productive for the student body. In the vein of understanding what SMCC is doing to produce good students, I asked Maisarah to share a little about PTK, and what they do on campus. Here is what she had to say:

PTK stands for Phi Theta Kappa which is the name for the Honors Society in SMCC. Alpha Chi Nu is the chapter of PTK SMCC is in. We’re normal people who just happen to have GPAs of 3.5 and above and paid $80 for a lifetime membership (suckers, I know).

As a society we’re involved in PTK stuff like HIA (Honors-In-Action) which requires us to start a new initiative/research project that helps our school/community.

Last year, we opened up the Captain’s Cupboard, an on-campus food pantry that helps needy students and their families with free food and donated clothes/books/ school supplies.

This year we’re researching on a socially responsible divestment programs that aim to discourage our school donors from investing in fossil fuel companies.

There you have it. We the students can be proud of our school for its relentless energy invested into its primary responsibility: you.