Many of the students at Penn State are tasked with “living a life with honors.” This may include Paterno Fellows, Millennium Scholars, Schreyer Honors College Students, and even the entire Penn State population in general. At face value, living a life with honors may be misconstrued as just getting good grades, or choosing to study a lot, or getting all your work done on time. However, there is more to honors than just being studious. Honors is a way of living life. Living a life with honors means living with scholarship, leadership, service, and character.

The first ideology the is necessary to living with honors is scholarship. Scholarship is the concept that people originally consider when thinking of honors. At its core, scholarship means performing well in classes. It means being prepared for classes and tests and knowing the material necessary to be successful. Scholarship is necessary to learn and to become a better student. It allows you to better your mind and to be prepared to enter the field of your choice for a career. To live with honors, embracing scholarship is a complete necessity.

The next necessity to living a life with honors is leadership. Leaders make the world turn, and leaders need to be present in any facet of life. Anywhere you go, whether it is a sports team, or a club, or a job, there needs to be a leader. Leadership is a quality that is constantly sought out and will help any person advance in their given field. To live with honors, it is expected to show leadership and be able to take control of a situation when necessary.

An important part of someone’s life that lives with honors is service. Service means helping others when they are unable to help themselves. When someone is better off and is fortunate in their life, it is their responsibility to provide help for others that are not as fortunate. This is not done as a method of personal gain. Instead, service allows someone to volunteer to make someone else’s life easier, because that is the right thing to do. A person living with honors uses service to help spread joy and happiness to others that may need it.

The final aspect of living a life with honors is character. Character is arguably the most important of these pillars, and is absolutely essential to have every single day. To have character means to always do the right thing, even if it doesn’t benefit you.  Someone with character must have integrity; that means being disciplined, respectful of others, and following the rules. If a person doesn’t display character on a daily basis, it is impossible for them to live their life with honors. Character is what makes someone a good person that people want to be around, rather than just a good student or good at what they do.

Going through everyday life with scholarship, leadership, service, and character in mind allows someone to live their life with honors. These four ideals make someone a better person and improve their own lives as well as those around them. Living a life with honors should not be a chore; it should be something to look forward to. Anyone can live their life with honors, and the more people that choose to do so, the better off we will be as a society.

Hendrick Smith is clearly a very experienced and smart person. His experience covering grassroots movements and politics over the course of many years is very impressive. He talked about how he has been covering these stories for six presidencies, and has traveled to a very large number of countries, an opportunity that almost no one gets.

One statement Smith said that struck me was that to really understand a country, you can not just stay in the capitol. This will not provide you with a real understanding of what the true state of a nation is. Rather, it is necessary to travel outside of these bounds and go to the real parts of the country. He traveled to where the “every day” people lived in order to understand how life is like for the average citizen in these countries. By doing this, he is able to see and hear the opinions of the many, not just the thoughts of the few in power. He can report on and write about movements of the people, thoughts that may be common, but are not set by the location’s authorities.

People will always be fighting for just and fair treatment, and Smith has taken on the role of showing this to the world. This fact is true of any time period and of almost any location. He discusses how he was present for the civil rights movements of the sixties, where college campuses like Alabama and Ole Miss finally became integrated. Additionally, he talks about his involvement in the much more recent issues that have arisen such as gerrymandering or the unlimited funding of political campaigns. This shows that he has covered stories across many different time periods and also in any location, whether this is across the United States, or in countries around this globe.

Smith is very confident that any and all movements that are able to cause big impactful change in our country and around the world start from the bottom up. For something to be changed, it originally has to be something that not everyone agrees with, but some people that truly believe in their cause take action and do what is necessary to get things done. In collaboration with this, Smith said the movement is always beginning with the minority of people. That is, change like the movements he covers are never easy, and people will always be against a larger group when they are fighting for a difference.

Smith references the Citizens United Initiative when discussing strategy for reform, and how it can be more successful. He says the leader of this movement, Elaina Nunez, showed that fixing the political system was the gateway to making progress and reform. He explains it should be a top priority, which is not the case for many other movements.

I found it interesting how Smith discusses how in today’s society, movements can be more effective if they are not strictly based along party lines. With the growing number of young independents, over 50%, it is much smarter to embrace everyone and bring as many people into a movement as possible. It is much less relevant today how they may stand politically, as long as they support your cause.

This podcast was very insightful, and I would be interested in hearing more from Hendrick Smith about how change can be brought about, and the best ways and methods to do so.

My first idea for my passion blog is an exotic foods blog. I could research, find, and maybe even eat different types of unique foods that I’ve never tried before. For each blog post, I could find a different food and explain where it came from, when it was first eaten, who first made it, where it is eaten today, what the ingredients are, how someone could cook this dish, and possibly even local places around State College where this food is served and could be tested by the people that read my blog. I would also include pictures of the food so people can see what they are reading about. If I have the opportunity to try the food I am writing about, I will also include my honest opinions about the food, both good and bad. I will also include if it is something I would like to try again, or if it is just a one time new experience.

My second idea for my passion blog would be a “game of the week” blog. I would discuss maybe the most exciting, interesting, bizarre, or just my favorite game from any sport that week. This may include NFL games, NBA games, MLB games, and obviously any exciting Penn State sports events that we all would recognize. I would discuss the outcomes, who I was rooting for, my opinions on any controversies, and basically any of my other opinions about either team or the event itself. I could also include highlights or summaries of what happened for anyone that may have missed the game and wanted to see what happened. Hopefully this blog would encourage people to find new interests in something they maybe hadn’t thought about or considered before. They might even be inspired to go see a Penn State event that they would not have gone to or maybe didn’t even know was happening before they read my blog. However, I am a Philly sports fan, so I might be a little biased in their favor.