Sigma Tau Delta Embraces Reading, Writing, Literature and Changes
Several members of Sigma Tau Delta attend the Mad Hatter Tea Party. Photo courtesy of the Sower Staff.
By Jetta Tegeler
Concordia University is home to the Rho Omicron chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, which is a national English honor society.
Students can be a part of this organization by being either a English major or minor, having 9 credit hours in English courses and having a high enough GPA in both English and overall. Members also have to pay a fee that goes to the national headquarters of the organization.
“We do all kinds of things throughout the year,” club advisor and English professor Gabriel Haley said. “In the fall, we typically do a Mad Hatter Tea Party. I dress up like the Mad Hatter, and everyone else can dress up however. There’s a spread of tea, coffee and sweets.”
Along with the Mad Hatter Tea Party in the fall, they also host movie nights throughout the school year. Another activity they offer is a poetry support group, which is a casual meeting where they read poems written by students and others and discuss them.
There are many other benefits to being in Sigma Tau besides the opportunity to be involved in all the activities mentioned above. Members also get to wear honor cords at graduation, and they will be lifetime members of the club, although the majority of their participation will be while they are in college Participation in an honor society like Sigma Tau looks good on a resume when applying for internships during college or when applying for jobs after graduation. Along with these benefits, you also get the chance to be around other students who also are interested in literature and the English language.
“It’s a really good time to be around other people who really like reading and writing and literature,” Haley said.
They also put together the award winning Potpourri, which is a student creative writing journal that is published every year. With the unexpected change to an online format for the semester, one of the two chief editors, senior Valery Rostek, was unsure of how they would publish this year’s journal. Some of the main concerns were how to train the junior editor and that none of the editors had access to InDesign, which is the program they normally use for formatting. Despite all of the challenges, though, they still are putting out the journal as usual.
“We do plan to deviate from the normal design of a volume of Potpourri in order to reflect how campus life has changed due to COVID-19”, Rostek said. “Potpourri will still be recognizable, but we hope that the changes we choose to make communicate the reality of COVID-19 in a meaningful way.”
