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The purpose of this article is to describe the most recent blogging project in an honors course--a collaborative student-success blog written for and by honors students. The project was conceived as the primary project for the course Honors Professional Development: Community Outreach for sophomores in the University of Florida Honors Program. This course was the third in a series of four professional development courses available to honors students starting in their freshman year. Students first had the opportunity to take Introduction to Honors Professional Development, a one-credit first-year-experience course focusing on an action plan for involvement in undergraduate research, study abroad, internships, leadership, and community service as well as workshops on resumé development and interview skills. Assignments included weekly online discussion topics, faculty interviews, community service and philanthropy projects, activity papers, reflections from the various workshops, and a final action plan. With six sections of the course offered, close to 150 first-year honors students typically take the course during their first semester. [This article was originally printed in "Honors in Practice" v7 2011.]

Countless articles in the news, combined with colorful anecdotes from faculty and staff, share common complaints about helicopters, lawnmowers, bulldozers, and snowplows--not transportation options on campus but rather parents of college students who stay actively involved in their students' lives. Honors faculty and administrators are tempted to dismiss this involvement as unnecessary and burdensome. At the University of Florida, though, rather than keeping their distance from parents and family members, they have opted to embrace the strengths of parental involvement by including them in their honors program. Given the parent and family involvement in higher education, examination of current institutional and honors initiatives can provide direction for honors administrators as they negotiate interactions with their students' families.

In Larry Clark's monograph chapter on the education of academically talented college students, he challenged honors educators to consider their role in helping students find their path, particularly through the addition of self-reflection and exploratory projects in honors courses. In an honors first-year experience (FYE) course for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors at the University of Florida, one assignment was designed in particular to meet the special needs of honors students and to achieve Larry Clark's goals. This article serves as an illustration and model of "helping students find their path" through Melissa Johnson's perspective as an instructor, and through the comments of two first-year students--Stephanie Podjed and Sean Taasan--who took an honors FYE course for STEM majors at the University of Florida. The honors FYE course for STEM majors is taught by an honors advisor with the assistance of two honors student leaders who are also STEM majors. This elective course introduces students to opportunities in the STEM fields that include research with faculty, internships, and global engagement while at the same time building skills in areas such as networking, interviewing, and résumé development. This one-credit course meets once a week for an hour, but also includes a hybrid component where students complete online modules to prepare them for each week's class. The online modules provide a series of guides where students reflect on the previous week's topic, review background material for the next week's topic, and search for and discuss opportunities relevant to their interests.

Social work programs in the United States (N = 74) were investigated to determine strategies used for recruiting and retaining MSW students of color. Most schools had student populations exceeding 25,000 and combined BSW, MSW, and PhD programs. Data were collected using a Graduate Recruitment and Retention Scale with corresponding and acceptably stable subscales (alpha coefficients = 0.86 and 0.83, respectively). Long-term and durable problems were revealed vis-à-vis graduate student diversity, and few significant differences existed between public and private MSW program student diversity efforts. One exception was personalized follow-up to inquiries about application processes (p = 0.01). Public or private status did not predict student diversity efforts in recruitment (Lambda [20, 35] = 0.542, p>0.05, partial eta squared = 0.458) or retention (Lambda [13, 50] = 0.865, p>0.05, partial eta squared = 0.135).

The article provides information on the peer leaders' responsibility to freshmen college students for honors professional development, which currently practiced at the University of Florida in Florida. It elucidates the capabilities of these peer facilitators and cites their ability to facilitate their co-students, particularly those who are in first year level. It mentions their wide array of responsibilities which include mentoring, tutorials, counseling, and even student assistance. Meanwhile, It highlights the implementation of the university's Honors Program and was designed for the development of the first and second year academic programs.

The article describes the perceptions and reactions of older people to smart home technologies and applications at the University of Florida Gator-Tech Smart Home. A structured discussion followed each demonstration of technologies and applications. Most respondents were in favor of the smart door and voice activation than any other smart technology and application.