Valencia College will launch the new James M. and Dayle L. Seneff Honors College in the fall of 2012, providing new opportunities for students to excel at Valencia.
Funded by a $1 million donation from Orlando resident and CNL executive chairman James M. Seneff and his wife, Dayle, the new honors college will expand Valencia’s current honors program into a full-fledged honors college.
The James M. and Dayle L. Seneff Honors College will feature four different tracks, each of which will be housed on a separate Valencia campus.
- East Campus will host a track for students interested in academic research and is especially for students who plan to go to graduate school or professional school. With the guidance of a professor, students will learn how to conduct undergraduate research and will complete a research project and paper by the end of their second year.
- Osceola Campus will house the college’s leadership track, encouraging students to study different styles of leadership, and become agents of change in their communities. The track also has a service component, requiring students to perform community service with partner organizations in Osceola County.
- West Campus will be home to the interdisciplinary honors track, a humanities-style, multicultural curriculum that features team-taught courses on a wide variety of subject matter, from history to science, from art to philosophy.
- Winter Park Campus will be home to the “Jeffersonian” or general studies honors track. The track, which will offer students a well-rounded education and the opportunity to collaborate with college students in other countries, is still being developed. It will be available in 2013.
For a short time, students who apply to the honors college and are accepted will be offered full tuition scholarships. To qualify, students must apply for admission to the program by May 1. The regular deadline for fall admission to the James M. and Dayle L. Seneff Honors College is July 20.
For those who miss the May 1 deadline, there are still special scholarships available only to honors students.
The average class size for courses in the honors college will be about 15 students. In addition, honors students will receive individual attention and will have their own campus-based counselor. Honors students are also allowed to register for classes early, and have use of the Honors Resource Center.
Honors students also have the opportunity to travel abroad with their professors, and each month, students participate in events such as “pizza with the professors,” providing personal contact with their instructors.
Recent honors graduates from Valencia are finishing their undergraduate studies at Columbia University in New York, Emory University in Atlanta, Amherst College and Smith College in Massachusetts.
For more information on the new James M. and Dayle L. Seneff Honors College or to apply, go to http://valenciacollege.edu/honors/prospective-students/admission.cfm
Angel, who’s now 31, began dreaming about college in prison. There, he’d taken the GED and earned a high-school diploma. His father had always preached the value of an education, so Angel took correspondence courses while he was behind bars. Eventually, he earned a paralegal certificate – and landed a job as a clerk in the prison law library. And there, Angel was inspired to go to college.
In prison, Angel listened to National Public Radio most of the day. And because the only newspaper available was USA Today, he read it faithfully. One day, Angel came across a two-page spread on the USA All-Academic Community College Team. “They were all second-chance people, people who’ve crashed and come back,” says Angel. “I decided right there, that I was going to find a community college and I’m going to go and make this USA All-Academic Team.”
Angel began writing to many of the state’s two-year colleges, asking if they’d let him enroll after he was released. Several returned form letters or catalogs. But Lisa Larson, who was working in Valencia’s admissions department at the time, saw Angel’s letter, asking for information. It was a plea for help. So she packed up a student course catalog and attached a Post-It note with a simple sentence: “Come see us when you get out.”
Angel latched onto that note. It was the hope he needed.
“I would have been happy if they’d sent a student handbook,” says Angel. “But they sent a note!”
And it led Angel to move to Orlando with nothing but a dream. Here, he found housing at the Salvation Army men’s shelter. Although the 12-month program is designed to help men land a job, shelter assistant director Kent DeGuzman took a chance on Angel Sanchez: recently released prison inmate, with no work history, whose real ambition was to go to college.
A homeless man finds a home
DeGuzman, who worked in the corrections field for six years, knows how easy it is for offenders to land back in prison. But he quickly discovered that Angel Sanchez wasn’t average.
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Angel Sanchez (left) and Kent DeGuzman, inside the Salvation Army men's shelter[/caption]
Although Angel was upbeat and hard-working, he got frustrated by the number of times he got turned down for a job – and he had to land a job to stay at the Salvation Army. Just as he was ready to give up, Angel was offered a part-time job – flipping burgers at a hamburger stand on Orange Blossom Trail.
The job provided some comfort, but it also robbed Angel of one thing: an excuse for giving up and heading back to Miami.
“Going back to Miami was something that I wrestled with,” he says. “I remember crying myself to sleep some nights. I wanted to be celebrated, wanting to be hugged… I had all these emotional needs. And there was a world in Miami – a bad world – that was ready to hug me.
“But I knew that Miami was a step away from a prison cell.”
Landing that job saved him.
Determined to remake a life that many would have deemed hopeless, Sanchez rode the bus to Valencia’s West Campus. His tuition would be free, thanks to a state law that provides free tuition to homeless students, but Dr. Sylvester Robinson, who advises underprivileged students, knew that Angel would have other expenses, so he suggested that he fill out financial aid paperwork.
Rejected by the financial aid department, Angel learned that he’d been turned down because he’d never signed up for the U.S. Selective Service, which is required of men when they turn 18.
But the former prison law library clerk wasn’t ready to give up. He looked up the financial aid regulations – and, there in the fine print, lay the answer. Because he was in prison when he turned 18, he was exempt from the rule to register with the Selective Service. He highlighted the passage and submitted the regulation and rules along with his financial aid paperwork.
His application landed on the desk of Kenya Richardson, financial-aid coordinator at West Campus, who raised an eyebrow at the highlighted section of the regulations. She quickly called Robinson to ask if he’d looked up the regulations for Angel. “No,” Robinson replied, “the student did that.”
Richardson was floored. “I’ve got to meet this student,” she said. “No student does that.”
Richardson was so impressed that she hired Angel to be in the work-study program. Any student who would go to that trouble, she reasoned, would be able to maneuver through the morass of fine print in most financial aid documents.
Before long, Angel – with straight As – was making the President’s List, and was invited to join Valencia’s Seneff Honors College and become a member of the honor society. Over the course of the next year, he developed a large contingent of supporters, friends and faculty members.
“I like to say that by becoming homeless, I found a home,” says Angel.
Paying it forward
That would have been enough for many. But it wasn’t enough for Angel.
He mentored youngsters at the Coalition for the Homeless shelter and invited other honors students to join him. On late nights when he left campus, he stayed at the downtown bus station with another student while she waited for her transfer to another bus. And when the wife of Vice President Joe Biden visited Valencia College last year, Angel stood up – and challenged all the nation’s colleges to help homeless students like himself.
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Second Lady Jill Biden with Angel Sanchez at Valencia College[/caption]
“I have met many people who were just as bright as me, who worked as hard as me, but who didn’t succeed because they didn’t meet the right people,” says Angel. “I look back and see individuals inside institutions – Valencia, the Salvation Army – who vouched for me. They tried to change a cookie-cutter system to make it a system that looks at people, case-by-case.”
Those people – from the manager who hired him to work at the burger joint, to Kent DeGuzman, to Lisa Larson and Kenya Richardson at Valencia College – are all Angel’s angels.
Still, Angel has faced obstacles. When he chose to enroll in the honors college’s leadership track, he had to ride a bus two hours each way to go to the Osceola Campus where the leadership track was based. But Angel plugged away, riding the bus until he could save enough money for a used car.
And when Phi Theta Kappa – the national honor society for students at the nation’s two-year colleges -- told him he could not be a member because he is still serving probation, Angel turned in his PTK regalia sadly, but without rancor. Instead, he turned his attention toward changing the rules. Other PTK students around the country have taken up his cause.
“Some people call me ‘resilient,’ “ says Angel. “I don’t know if I am. But I have a characteristic: If I have a problem, I get stressed out for five minutes, get mad for five minutes, and then spend the rest of my time trying to work it out.”
Yet those challenges have inspired him to think bigger. When he met another student with a felony record – a young woman who graduated from University of California at Berkeley and is now attending Northwestern University’s law school – Angel was inspired to look beyond earning a degree in paralegal studies. Now he has set his sights on law school or graduate school.
And in April, he learned that he has won one of the most prestigious scholarships in the country: the Jack Kent Cooke Transfer Scholarship – which awards up to $90,000 over three years to approximately 85 students annually. Now, many doors are now open to Angel. Although he loves Orlando and is applying to UCF’s Burnett Honors College, he is also applying to Yale’s Eli Whitney Program, the University of Chicago and Columbia University.
And after earning his undergraduate degree, he plans to head to law school.
It’s hard to imagine anyone stopping him.
Kenther Ramos will be studying for his master's degree at the University of York.[/caption]
But his professors at Rollins urged him to keep his eyes on the prize – a master’s degree in international relations. And one of them, Dr. Jayashree Shivamoggi, who guides Rollins students through the process of applying for prestigious fellowships, suggested that Kenther apply for a Fulbright scholarship.
Fulbright scholars are sponsored by the U.S. State Department to study abroad – and become cultural ambassadors for the United States. As an immigrant and an advocate for human rights, Kenther would make an outstanding Fulbright scholar, she said.
“He is one of the most inspiring students I’ve ever met,” says Dr. Shivamoggi. “Every meeting with him has been an inspiration to me. This is a person who’s going to go far.”
Shivamoggi notes that 10,000 American college students apply for the 40 Fulbright spots in the United Kingdom.
Now 29, Kenther wants to build a career fighting for the rights of others.
“We’re living in a very divided world,” says Kenther. “We need people who are willing to bring others together… We need problem-solvers, not people who can only point out problems.”
Cardiovascular tech Angela Murphy revisits the Valencia College Cath Lab in the Allied Health Sciences building, where she learned her current trade.[/caption]
Angela Murphy, who graduated from the cardiovascular technology program with honors, simulates the catheterization process in the Allied Health Sciences building on West Campus.[/caption]
As president of student government association on East Campus, Success Ekpenyong addresses Valencia College Board of Trustees in the new School of Arts and Entertainment building on on October 25, 2017.[/caption]
“I’ve never met someone so driven to serve his community and to make an impact on this world,” says Deanne Abrams, an advisor to Ekpenyong. “He is determined to change the trajectory of the lives of Valencia students and to help others build the skillsets they need to be successful in their future careers.’
Ekpenyong’s own trajectory takes him to the University of South Florida this fall, as he seeks a bachelor’s degree in business analytics and information systems.
“My experience at Valencia has made me stronger, helped me to understand myself better and gave me a greater understanding of my purpose,” says Ekpenyong. “I am not where I want to be yet, but I know too well I am not where I used to be - thanks to Valencia College.”
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Success at 49th Annual Valencia College Commencement ceremony at the CFE Arena on May 6, 2018 in Orlando, Fla.[/caption]
That’s why, after one semester at Osceola Campus, he began taking most of his classes at the West Campus, where he took computer courses and became a part of Valencia’s Seneff Honors College – and its challenging and well-known Interdisciplinary Honors program (IDH).
Although Gutensohn considered himself an underachiever in high school, IDH appealed to him. “I’ve always been interested in the pursuit of knowledge,” he says. “And, growing up in a family of 10 kids, I thrive on debates and conversation. IDH seemed like the most interesting choice for me.”
As it turns out, the choice was providential. In the IDH program, the Valencia humanities professors “opened my eyes to the interdisciplinary nature of everything.”
“Right now, I’m studying a bunch of visual design principles. You’re programming humans as much as you’re programming computers, because we have to be able to guide people to use the software,” he says. “There’s a lot of psychology and art in it. And IDH opened the door to that, for me.”
Shooting for the stars
After graduating from Valencia College, Gutensohn transferred to Rollins College’s Hamilton Holt School, primarily because the Rollins evening program offered him what he found at Valencia – small classes and the chance to focus on computer science.
(The Hamilton Holt School no longer offers a computer science major to students in the evening program.)
“The Rollins computer science program was small -- even compared to Valencia. What I really gained there was the opportunity to be part of a small cohort. I got to know my fellow classmates and I got to know my professors on a more personal level.”
While at Rollins, he became interested in human-computer interaction, thanks to professor Valerie Summet. But it was a chance visit to Kennedy Space Center that changed his life’s trajectory – and launched him on his career path.
“I had always wanted to go to Kennedy Space Center, but had never been. My little brother was 11 and wanted to go, so I took him. I went and I thought it was going to be the lamest thing in the world, but that it would be cool for my younger brother,” says Gutensohn. “Instead, I went in and I was just blown away by all of it.”
“When we left, as I was walking out with my little brother, I said, ‘I’m going to work here,’ ” he recalls. “I know that sounds cheesy -- like it never happened -- but it really did.”
And so began a series of NASA internships – the first at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Burbank, Calif., followed by two at Kennedy Space Center. And, in summer of 2018, after graduating from Rollins, Gutensohn returned to JPL for another internship.
Meanwhile, he began applying to universities with good graduate programs in human-computer interaction. He quickly zeroed in on UC Berkeley because the program was small – and had the same intimate class feel that he’d experienced at Valencia and Rollins.
Home sweet home
After learning he’d been accepted at UC Berkeley, Gutensohn launched yet another project – building his own graduate school apartment.
Because renting an apartment in Berkeley would cost a fortune, Gutensohn, bought an old RV and began renovating it – inspired, in part, by stories about a Google employee who lived in an RV in the company’s parking lot.
“I’d always been very interested in the tiny house movement, even before I started going to school. But building a tiny house is very time-consuming and very expensive. The second best thing would be to buy a school bus and renovate that -- and the third best thing was gutting an RV and renovating it.”
So he bought a 1989 RV and stripped the interior to make way for an updated kitchen, a sofa and a platform bed. Then, in a cross-country road trip worthy of a movie – with the RV breaking down in Pensacola, Fla., El Paso, Tex., and Las Cruces, N.M. – Gutensohn finally arrived in Berkeley, where he rented the side yard of someone’s home. Now his RV is parked in the side yard and he’s happily ensconced in his own private getaway.
“I’ve got power, I’ve got water. I’ve got a desk and office chair in my RV. I’ve got a kitchen. It’s like a tiny house or a very small apartment,” he says. But best of all, he doesn’t have to share his space. “Growing up in a big family, having my own space is very attractive to me. Not having roommates and not having to deal with someone’s house rules is very important to me.”
Meanwhile Gutensohn is plotting his path through the stars – and a career at NASA.
During his first semester, he and a partner worked on building gloves that change temperature based on the user’s virtual environment – so if a user in a virtual environment touches something hot, the gloves get hot. If they touch ice, the gloves get cold.
Next up is a summer internship at Apple, where he’ll be working as a software engineer.
“(Grad school) is hard; it’s tough work. But I’ve also been able to take some fun courses, where I get to build things,” says Gutensohn. “As soon as I got here, I knew I made the right decision.”
Photo credit: NASA photos courtesy of Scott Cook, Rollins College. Photo at bottom left, courtesy of Michael Gutensohn.
