[rachelholladay]

Hello, my name is Rachel Holladay and I am a 2012 Dean's List Winner (and a junior..). I have been following this thread and have just returned from the Deans List Summit. I would like to offer a humble opinion that represents only my thoughts and not official ones from FIRST HQ.

There's an element to being a Dean's List Winner that I did not realize into this past weekend. Becoming a DL Winner is an absolutely immense honor that also entails taking on quite an ambitious job. You see, when we had our meetings with Dean he laid out that we had been chosen out of all of our peers as leaders within FIRST. Now that we had been selected we had a new level responsibility to the FIRST community and the FIRST vision. To say Dean gave us homework is an understatement, he gave a huge project. Right now I'll be a little vague with what it is, but trust me, you will find out. (Oh gosh, this must be how the GDC feels..) The project would be considerably harder (to borderline nearly impossible) if all the winners had been seniors and therefore were leaving for college for the simple reason that college freshman have a lot on their plate already. Its almost as if the DL Winners were not only chosen to be honored but also chosen to work on an important task force.