Smittcamp Gives Back - Fall 2022

Smittcamp volunteer activities plant the seeds for lifelong community engagement. Our alumni demonstrate this by speaking at the Honors College colloquium, mentoring current students, providing internship opportunities, and supporting the Honors College with their generous financial donations.  

All these activities are ingredients in a culture of philanthropy. We will be highlighting those Smitties who choose to give back on our social media platforms and in upcoming newsletters.

In this issue, we would like to showcase the following Smittcamp alumni: 

Matt Mealer, Senior Video Producer

On October 3rd, 2022, Matt Mealer gave a presentation at Honors Colloquium entitled “These Cliches I Know to be True: Four Hackneyed Life Lessons that Proved Hackneyed for Good Reason.” Reflecting on the experience, he said:

“It was very much an unexpected compliment to be invited to speak by Dr. Attar, particularly since he and I had not previously met. I remember well attending colloquium in my own student days (at that time on Thursday nights) and the wide variety of speakers and topics we were exposed to. I rarely speak in public, and had never done so in a lecture format, so the prospect of taking the stage ten years on was somewhat intimidating! I’m more experienced speaking to people within my own professional field, so the trick was developing a theme that could appeal to a more general audience.

My goal was to share reflections and lessons of the sort I wish someone had shared with me when I was an undergraduate, things relevant to any professional pursuit. There’s serious value in learning directly from others’ personal experiences, particularly when the age gap is small enough for both speaker and audience to have grown up in at least relatively similar cultural contexts.

I suppose that would be my encouragement to other alumni of my age: don’t wait to share what you’ve learned with younger people. Be open, be real, about your own personal and professional development, the failures, the false starts, and the successes, even as they play out in the present day. We live in strange, unprecedented times, and there’s much to be said for open lines of honest communication between generations.”

- Matt Mealer