‘Our success is our students’: Shackouls Honors College celebrates 50 years of honors education at MSU
Contact: Sasha Steinberg
STARKVILLE, Miss.—ĸ’s Judy and Bobby Shackouls Honors College is celebrating 50 years of the university’s honors program supporting some of the nation’s best and brightest students in their pursuit of educational excellence.
Chris Snyder, who became the honors college’s first dean in 2011, said the celebration marks five decades of undergraduate student accomplishment and highlights the university’s dedication to helping tomorrow’s young leaders reach their full potential.
Over the last five years, MSU honors students have been accepted to some of the world’s most competitive graduate schools, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, universities of California-Berkeley, Cambridge, Michigan, Oxford, Texas at Austin and Virginia, as well as Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Rutgers universities.
“We are witnessing—at Harvard, Columbia, Oxford and other world-class institutions—the realization of the investment made by Judy and Bobby Shackouls and MSU presidents like Donald Zacharias and Mark Keenum in recruiting top undergraduates to MSU and providing them with outstanding teachers and mentors,” said Snyder, also a professor of European history.
In 2006, a generous gift from Judy and Bobby Shackouls transformed the University Honors Program into MSU’s Shackouls Honors College. Bobby Shackouls, a Greenville native and MSU chemical engineering alumnus, is retired chairman, president and chief executive officer of the oil and gas company Burlington Resources Inc.