Members of Mortar Board exemplify pillars of excellence
Rachel Arehart
Antelope Staff
The deadline is coming up for applications for Mortar Board. Students may apply to this exclusive honor society in December of their junior year.
Members are selected to lead and serve. Selection of students in Mortar Board is also based on a 3.5 GPA minimum and a requirement of being a full-time student with 88 credit hours completed before being inducted. Members are required to attend regular meetings as scheduled and any other events hosted by Mortar Board.
“Mortar board is a national senior honor society that’s on 231 campuses in our nation. We have about 30 members in our Mortar Board at UNK,” said Emma Neil, a Papillion senior secondary education social sciences major with an ESL endorsement and political science minor and current president of Mortar Board.
Mortar Board members are chosen based on three pillars of excellence: scholarship, leadership, and service.
“Mortar board is an organization of students who were chosen as some of the best students on our campus to lead in different ways, whether it be service, leadership or scholarship, to make our campus recognized for the great things that we do and to make it better,” said McKenzie Cuba, a senior business administration-management major from Silver Creek.
“One of the cool things about Mortar Board is the people that are actually involved in it. We have leaders from all across campus from all different organizations representing different parts of the entire student body,” Cuba said. “We have people in Greek life, we have people who are not Greek, we have people leading LPAC, we have people leading people in chemistry clubs, so it’s all these amazing people who have all these amazing values coming together to do amazing things for campus.”
Cuba said that the members put in 110 percent into everything they do because they care about the campus, and each other.
Mortar Board centers its events around service, which is one of their three pillars. The members have a campus clean-up day, where they commit hours to picking up trash to give back to the university. Mortar Board hosts a faculty dinner, where each member brings a professor or other faculty member that they would like to be honored. They also pick a day to read to elementary students, which Maggie McPhillips, a senior 7-12 language arts education major from Humphrey, said is to give back to the Kearney community.
“The reason I think that Mortar Board is such a cool group is I feel like they go above and beyond setting those expectations for what an organization on campus should be,” said McPhillips, “Being around these student leaders has pushed me to become more involved on campus and to be become a better student.”
Miranda Ketteler, a senior social work major from Petersburg and vice president of Mortar Board, said that her favorite part of this organization is how many students are involved in various activites around campus. “It’s really fun to see that involvement and what that brings to the table for Mortar Board,” Ketteler said.
Other members agreed with Ketteler that their favorite part of Mortar Board is the variety of different organizations that the members of Mortar Board are a part of.
Neil added that Mortar Board also includes student athletes and several members doing undergraduate research.
Besides being involved in different organizations, members agreed the students in the organization had a lot of things in common.
“Mortar Board is a prestigious organization composed of a multitude of people who are very different, but at the same time, we share similar values,” said Drew Thompson, a senior biology pre-med major from Aurora.
Rachel Arehart
Video @ the Antelope
