It was at Mānoa Experience 2023, the April 1 campus-wide open house that draws thousands of prospective students to the University of Hawaiʻi flagship campus, that greeter Tara H. Sutton learned the news. She is the College of Social Sciences’ 2023 Outstanding Graduating Senior (OGS), an annual award that exemplifies the core values of scholarship, leadership and service. On being told that she had won, Sutton covered her face and started crying. “It was overwhelming,” said the 46-year-old Honolulu resident. “This award means everything to me, because it honors the ways my family encourages me to dream big, then makes room for me to pursue those dreams.”
Sutton will graduate with a 3.9 GPA and a long list of accomplishments. Among them, she is vice president of Pi Gamma Mu, the CSS honor society; a CSS Student Ambassador; service chair for the Speech Communication Society; and volunteer coordinator and former president of the Anthropology Undergraduate Student Association. In April, she won the Joseph Fielding Smith Memorial Award for outstanding Communicology undergraduate; in October 2022, she was the only student panelist at the UH Innovation Conference on Water Resilience in Hawaiʻi.
...
Read the full article at CSS News, College of Social Sciences.