A Message from the Dean

The Custom-Designed Major is the only major in the Pennoni Honors College. It is one of the smallest and most challenging majors at the University.

You are a unique group of students who combine two seemingly contradictory qualities: rigor and flexibility. Rigor involves precision, direction, focus. Flexibility involves comfort with ambiguity and the indeterminate. We rarely see these qualities together. Most people aren't able to reconcile them until relatively late in life, if at all. Yet you, our Custom-Designed Major students, have been able to do this during your college experience.

Our society is undergoing rapid and radical change. For some, this entails a painful process of adjustment, one that stokes anger, fear, and resentment. But for others, change is a source of excitement and creativity. You are in the latter group, armed with the tools needed to face this changing world with energy and creative insight. You are ahead of the curve in breaking out of a conventional paradigm for education and career.

So, let me congratulate you, students who, under the direction of our exceptional professional staff and faculty mentors, are well prepared for what lies ahead.

I want to conclude by noting that this is the last graduating class that I will preside over as dean of the Pennoni Honors College. In my 10 years in this position, I have seen how students in this program have thrived, finding new avenues in which to be creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial. I hope in returning to my faculty role as an English professor I will be able to mentor future students who want to use literature, film, or fiction writing in their customized toolbox. I look forward to that.

Sincerely,

Paula Marantz Cohen, PhD
Dean, Pennoni Honors College