GS Honor Society Inducts 42 Top Student Scholars
More than 100 guests gathered to celebrate the induction of 42 students into the Honor Society of the School of General Studies at its Fall 2014 Induction Ceremony on Tuesday, September 30 in Buell Hall's East Gallery. The Honor Society, created in 1997 to celebrate the academic achievement of exceptional GS scholars, is open to juniors or seniors with 3.8 GPA or above who have completed at least 30 points at Columbia University.
The ceremony opened with a welcome from Dean Peter J. Awn, who shared that fewer than 5 percent of GS students are inducted into the Honor Society.
The chief aim of the Honor Society is to cultivate interaction among current students committed to intellectual discovery and the faculty who enjoy teaching them. Alumni continue to participate in Society activities after graduating.
The keynote address at this year's ceremony was delivered by GS alumnus Michael Brownstein '04, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY/John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His speech, "Trusting Your Untrustworthy Self," addressed both the benefits and dangers of relying on one's intuition when making decisions.
"You’re not magically exempt from suffering from the conjunction fallacy, the bystander effect, implicit bias, or the many other intellectual and moral frailties science has uncovered, just because you’re a good guy or whatever. This means that you—and all of us—have got work to do. The work is figuring out when and how to trust our instincts, and how to cultivate them so that we may increase our self-trust."