04/13/2022
RICE Day 2022 - Our Outstanding Senior of the Year is Halley Holm.
She shared a few thoughts at our awards ceremony:
First of all, I want to thank everyone for this opportunity. For my classmates, I think we can agree we have been through a lot together. I’m not going to go too into detail about our experience with COVID because we all lived it. However, when we went remote when COVID first started, I did not know who all the social work majors in our class were. Then when we came back in the fall of 2020, we suddenly had a class together every single day of the week. We navigated through meeting with our Older Learning Partners on Zoom together. We read and discussed many books throughout the years. Debated our thoughts on case studies. We would not have the knowledge we have today if it had not been for each other, even in the moments when we did not all agree and we challenged each other. I have seen every single one of us grow over this past semester, and I am very excited to see what the future holds for us.
I think all of us students can agree that we are extremely thankful for Tammy, Lynn, and Tricia. We have learned so much from everyone and also had fun. I asked my classmates for their favorite fun memory of each professor, and we all agreed on some key moments. For Tammy, we all loved going to her farm and holding her chicks, even though I was the only one who got pooped on. For Tricia, we loved doing Yoga Nidra in class and that we were allowed to fall asleep. And for Lynn, we loved when he asked who would be interested in dating his nephews, described them to our Social Policy class game-show style, all because his brother and sister-in-law “wanted them out of the house”. All of our professors have their unique styles, but I wanted to share these stories because the fun times were just as important as the serious times. Our education is extremely applicable to everyday life, and these fun times allowed us to lighten the at-times heavy load. After all, social workers are tasked with making the world a better and more equitable place, and we all know how many things are working against that. However, I think we are up to the challenge.