Honors Day
2008 Speeches

David Hardnett '08
David is a senior from Chicago, IL. David is a political science major, with concentrations in management and Chinese. David has been involved with the Class of 2008 senior giving campaign and is a member of the Black and Gold Corps. He had the opportunity to spend fall of his junior year studying Chinese in Shanghai, China. Family is very important to David. His father, Milton, is a pastor and financial planner. Donna, his mother, is a teacher. David has three brothers - Stephen who is in the U.S. Navy, and Jonathan and Joseph, still in high school. His sister, Sarah, is in the U.S. Air Force.
Read David's Speech

Leslie Abell '08
Leslie is a senior from Red Wing, MN, majoring in English with a concentration in women's studies. While at St. Olaf she has participated in Chapel Choir, student congregation, and the senior campaign committee. During fall of her junior year, she traveled and studied abroad in the Global Studies program. She has had internships working on a Native American reservation and working with a group of attorneys on housing issues in downtown Chicago. Leslie volunteers with the St. Olaf Cancer Connection Honor House and as a sexual assault crisis-line advocate for the Hope Center. Leslie will be doing an internship at the ELCA World Hunger department in Chicago following graduation. Then she is off to Antarctica to work in the kitchen of a National Science Foundation base. After that, she'd like to join the Peace Corps, with thoughts of law school or graduate school following.
Read Leslie's Speech

Samiha Sidhom Peterson, Gertrude Boe Overby Distinguished Professor of Sociology/Anthropology
Dr. Peterson was born in Luxor, Egypt and grew up in Cairo. She earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees from American University in Cairo. Peterson joined the St. Olaf faculty in 1972 after earning her Ph.D. in sociology/anthropology from the University of Minnesota. Peterson's professional interests include women and development, children's lives, international norms and their impact on social change, global interdependence, and the role of technology for expediting change in the non-Western world.
Read Samiha Sidhom Peterson's Speech