Up Front | Students

June 2001: Vol. 80, No. 3

More than six times as many on-campus new freshmen made 4.0 GPAs as their off-campus counterparts.

Undergrads in residence halls post higher GPAs for 14th straight term
Dorms = better grades

Living in a campus residence hall doesn't guarantee a student better grades, but evidence suggests it helps.

For the 14th consecutive academic term, undergraduate students living in residence halls posted higher GPAs than students living off campus. More than six times as many on-campus new freshmen earned a 4.0 GPA as their off-campus counterparts.

For fall semester 2000, the average GPA for all residence-hall students was 3.04, compared to 3.0 for all undergraduates. For freshmen, the averages were 2.95 for those living in residence halls versus 2.91 for all others.

Those scores continue a trend that began in the fall quarter of 1995, when the housing department began tracking grades of on- and off-campus undergraduates. In that term, the on-campus average GPA for all students was 2.83 and the off-campus score was 2.81. Off-campus students have never topped the on-campus average.

—Larry Dendy (ABJ '65)

Rodeo delights young fans

The Block and Bridle Club's annual Great Southern Stampede Pro Rodeo [see June '99 issue of GM] gives youngsters a taste of rodeo competition by putting them aboard a bull . . . a very tame bull.

Choksi is inaugural Gates Cambridge Scholar; UGA goes 4-for-4 in Goldwater
Students earn top scholarships

Semil Choksi, a graduating senior from Suwanee who majored in genetics, is among the inaugural recipients of the new Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Funded by a $210 million endowment from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the merit-based scholarships—which are similar to Oxford's Rhodes Scholarship—cover one to three years of study at the University of Cambridge in England.

At UGA, Choksi was involved in research on how fruit flies process hormones and presented his work at the annual symposium sponsored by the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities—an experience that proved useful in his interviews for the Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

"The panel fired questions at me," says Choksi, "and focused on the research I had done and want to do."

He was also questioned on his interest in ballroom dance—which was sparked by an introductory class that led to him joining UGA's Ballroom Performance Group.

Semil Choksi

Choksi learned he had received the Gates Cambridge Scholarship via a phone call from his mother. "She started reading the letter from the director of the trust, but didn't have her glasses on," he recalls. "She read, 'The panel was not impressed by the interview.' Then I asked her to read it again, and she said, 'Oh, it says the panel was most impressed."

Choksi thinks his UGA background was an asset in the selection process.

"At the interviews, I saw all these students from Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. But I think there's something about being from a good state school in the South. The uniqueness is a factor. Plus, I think I've gotten the best education possible here."

For the second time in five years, all four UGA students nominated for the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship were successful. The recipients: Beth Orcutt (marine science/chem), who wants to conduct aquatic biogeochemical research; Paul Pollack (math), who plans to research easily stated problems in the theory of numbers; Steven Smith (biology/genetics), who wants to conduct scientific research in human disease; Lakshmi Swamy (comp. science/microbiology), who plans to apply computational methods to develop new technologies for infectious disease prevention.