Sekhar named executive director of Honors College
Chair of the Modern Languages Department Amy Sekhar was recently selected as the new executive director of the Honors College. She will take her position next semester, dropping her current role as chair of the modern languages department. Sekhar, who teaches introductory and advanced French courses, serves on various committees and recently became active on various committees within Faculty Senate.
Sekhar believes that being enrolled in the Honors College is very beneficial to students, both academically and socially.
“[Honors College] students have this sense of community. They’re kind of with a smaller cohort and have this sort of common goal,” Sekhar said. “But I think later on, once you start the honors project process and have selected your advisor, you have an opportunity to work really closely with a faculty member in your field.”
In her new position, Sekhar aspires to create more honors courses that fit into the core requirements at the University of Indianapolis. She also hopes to see a better-defined honors faculty.
“My kind of vision involves hefty changes and more doable changes right away, so obviously nothing is going to change right out the door,” she said.
Currently some sections of courses are designated as honors courses. Sekhar would like to see a change in this area of the honors program as well, developing the courses.
Sekhar hopes to get feedback from honors students to put plans in motion. She also expects to get an idea of the things that can be changed more quickly before heading into summer.
“I’ve been talking to current honors students and looking at their frustrations and what they do like about the honors program,” she said “I think a lot of students are frustrated with the proposal process and things like that, and that’s something that I can look at right away and really get student feedback.”
Freshman psychology major and honors student Micah Long has frustrations of her own when it comes to the Honors College.
“I would like the curriculum to be more well-explained,” Long said. “The curriculum was confusing at first to understand, like how they incorporated it [the curriculum] in with everything else.”
Sekhar plans to set up her ideas and decide whether what she wants to do is achievable in her first year as the executive director of Honors College before she starts making any proposals.
“There’s a lot of tinkering that’s going to have to happen, working with other people to really get kind of a model set up,” Sekhar said. “I really want to be careful about it and make sure that it’s workable with how UIndy works.”
Aspirations of having team-taught honors courses are also part of the big picture for Sekhar. She sees a mixture of different teaching styles and discipline tactics. Mixing subjects together such as science and literature also is something that Sekhar hopes to accomplish, even though the changes won’t be immediate.
“As far as those go—the big changes—they’re going to be really long-term, just because curriculum changes take a long time,” she said. “You have to go through the whole committee process. And of course, I have to make it work with the system.”
Sekhar wants many things to change, but she knows that setting these changes in motion will take time and patience.
“The main point is that I have a lot of ideas, and I think some of them can happen quickly and some of them are going to take a lot of collaboration from students, faculty and administration,” Sekhar said. “We’re going to have to pull together to make sure it’s a vision that everybody wants and is excited about. And that’s going to take a while, because I want to end up with something that people are excited about.”
