Honors College Retrospective Reflection
As I near the conclusion of my Honors College experience, I find myself reflecting not on what I did, but on how the Honors curriculum shaped who I am becoming inside and outside of the classroom. When I began Honors in H200, I thought success meant excelling in nursing coursework and checking service hours off my resume. Now, looking back on the artifacts I’ve selected, I see a how I have transformed from a student focused on performance to a scholar committed to systemic understanding, reflective practice, and community impact. These experiences make me more confident in the skills I have to become a great nurse after graduation.
When I entered the Honors College and completed my first “I Am / I Want to Become” statements in H200, I believed I had a clear understanding of myself. I described myself as motivated, compassionate, and driven toward a career in nursing. I wrote about wanting to become a knowledgeable caregiver and a dependable healthcare professional. While those statements were honest, they were also incomplete. At the time, my identity was shaped largely by achievement and aspiration rather than experience.
Looking back now, through my Honors research and sustained community engagement, I can see how those early statements evolved. My Honors journey did not replace who I said I was, but rather it deepened it. The artifacts I’ve chosen to showcase document this shift from self-definition rooted in intention to one grounded in lived experiences.
In H200, my “I Am” statement focused on personal qualities like dedication, empathy, and a desire to help others. My “I Want to Become” statement centered on professional success like becoming a competent nurse, a strong student, and a reliable member of the healthcare team. These goals were meaningful, but they reflected a limited view of health and service that focused primarily on individual interactions rather than broader systems.
As my Honors experience evolved, these statements became living documents rather than fixed reflections. Through coursework, research, and service, I began to understand that who I am is connected to where and who I serve. My sense of identity expanded to include advocacy, critical reflection, and accountability to communities beyond the classroom.
My updated understanding of “who I want to become” now includes being a nurse who recognizes social determinants of health, values prevention, and understands that meaningful care often begins long before a patient enters a hospital. This shift is evident across my Honors showcases, where reflection replaces assumptions and exploration replaces certainty.
“Change is made of choices, and choices are made of character.”
My Honors research experience was a turning point in supporting my “I want to become” statement with action. Engaging in research taught me how to ask better questions, not just about what is happening in healthcare, but why. Research pushed me to move beyond surface-level understanding and engage critically with evidence, theory, and collaboration.
Through this work, I learned that health outcomes are rarely the result of isolated decisions. Instead, they are shaped by policy, access, education, and environment. Research demanded patience, humility, and intellectual discipline, which are qualities I had not fully associated with myself in H200.
This experience reshaped my self-perception. I began to see myself not only as a future healthcare professional, but as someone who is capable of analyzing systems and advocating for informed change. Research bridged the gap between my academic interests and my desire to serve, grounding my ambitions in evidence rather than assumptions.
- Amanda Gorman
My volunteer experiences at Dayspring Center, SHarP Gardens, and the IU Student Outreach Clinic were instrumental in transforming my “I am” statement from descriptive to more reflective. Each site divulged a different dimension of community health and reinforced the limitations of viewing healthcare solely through a clinical lens.
At the Dayspring Center, I saw firsthand the crossroads of housing insecurity, family stress, and health vulnerability. This experience challenged my assumption that healthcare begins with diagnosis. Instead, I saw how stability, safety, and dignity form the foundation of overall wellness. Serving families at Dayspring reshaped my understanding of empathy from emotional awareness to systemic awareness.
At SHarP Gardens, I observed how access to nutritious food directly impacts long-term health outcomes. Volunteering there connected abstract discussions of food insecurity in nursing curriculum to tangible community action. This experience reinforced my evolving identity as someone who values preventative care and sustainability over corrective care.
The IU Student Outreach Clinic brought these lessons together. Interacting with individuals without consistent access to healthcare reshaped my understanding of the inequities that exist within the system I hope to serve. It solidified my desire to become a nurse who advocates for accessible, community-based care and recognizes barriers patients face outside clinical settings.
These experiences transformed volunteering from something I did into something that shaped who I am. They directly informed how I now define my purpose in healthcare.
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
The evolution of my “I Am / I Want to Become” statements also reflects the Honors College learning goals in action:
Intellectual Curiosity:
Engaged Learning:
Ethical Reasoning:
Civic Engagement:
Research and service pushed me to ask deeper questions about health equity and systems of care.
I connected nursing, public health, ethics, and lived community experiences into a cohesive and well-rounded understanding of health.
Volunteering exposed moral complexities that cannot be resolved with textbook answers alone but also adapting and thinking critically to find solutions.
My service experiences reinforced a commitment to community partnership rather than one-time intervention.
These experiences reshaped my philosophy of education and life. Learning became less about mastery and more about upholding my responsibility to patients, communities, and my future practice as a registered nurse.
As I move beyond the Honors College, my learning has provided more than academic preparation. It has given me clarity of my purpose and what I want to achieve. I leave with a refined sense of who I am and who I want to become:
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A nurse who listens, questions, and advocates for patients and the community.
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A professional who understands that health is shaped as much by the environment as by treatment plans.
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A lifelong learner who is committed to serving communities with humility and compassion.
The Honors experience taught me that identity is not concrete, it is formed through reflection, research, and service. My early “I want to become” statement has not been completed, rather, it has been strengthened and will continue to evolve.
“To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.”
- Winston Churchill