Congratulations to all of our students who received awards at the annual undergraduate student awards ceremony, which took place on Thursday, January 22nd in the political science lounge.
Participating faculty included current undergraduate Director Rebecca Kingston, Chair Ryan Balot and Professor Kanta Murali, who each welcomed students, staff, faculty and donors to the event.
Chair Ryan Balot began his remarks by stressing the importance of the undergraduate program to the department, and how, in his capacity as Chair, he hoped to highlight the role of pedagogy in the lives of faculty and improve the undergraduate program by expanding its offerings. Seeing the student winners, he said, is the best evidence that the project has worked.
He went on to say that despite the state of the world right now with the rise of authoritarians and dictators “you might think that things that we cherish like democracy are not doing very well nowadays. Those are the things we study in this department, and I hope that you've received the kind of education you wanted in understanding those things. When I look at you and your achievements, and what you've done in our program, I think you are the best antidote to those pessimistic outlooks across the globe, in higher education, pertaining to AI and so on, so I want to congratulate you and thank you for being here.”
Professor Kingston said: “These awards are one of the highlights of the year and we're very pleased to celebrate the accomplishments of our students, and to help them along to bigger and greater things in their path, both at the university and afterwards. Congratulations to you all for all your hard work and your achievements. There's no better pleasure for our faculty members than to see their students thrive, learn and do well. I'd like to thank the members of the department who served on the awards committee with me; Andrew MacDougall, Madison Schramm, Lana Salman and Liz Jagdeo. Thanks so much for your help.”
A complete list of award recipients is available here: 
Undergraduate_Awards_2024_25.pdf