The Honors Transfer Program, the club has been running since 2008 and was created by the former director Donna Mekis and former Cabrillo history faculty member Michael Mangin.
Very few clubs at Cabrillo’s Aptos location offer their members a great deal of challenge while also echoing the importance of community and education, like the Honors Transfer Club.
According to Dr. Letita Scott-Curtis, the current director of the Honors Transfer Program, the club has been running since 2008 and was created by the former director Donna Mekis and former Cabrillo history faculty member Michael Mangin.
While it’s easy to join the Honors Transfers Club, it can be quite a challenge to maintain what is expected of members. According to Dr. Scott-Curtis, club members are expected to complete at least 15 honors units while maintaining a minimum GPA of 3.4.
However, despite the rigorous requirements to be a club member, Co-Vice President Carlo De Silva, who hopes to transfer to USC to study molecular biology to enter medical school to specialize in heart surgery, expressed there was a sense of community amongst club members.
“What I enjoy about the Honors Transfer Club is our sense of community, especially coming in as a high school senior and transitioning here. I didn’t know many people, so I was in a group of like-minded scholars. It’s really nice to have this cohort that we see each other. We talk to each other and we communicate about what we want to do as a club and how we can contribute to the honor student body as well as Cabrillo as a whole, ” De Silva said.
De Silva further went into how the Honors Transfer Club supports students transferring to a 4-year university:
“I think it took a lot of the confusion away from questions like how do you transfer? How do you get into honors? What to expect? Because often you’re like, okay, I just need to transfer, and then no one tells you how you do it. In this club, we really communicate with each other. Like how are the applications going? What are things to improve your stats? To get into a college and have the community really helps,” De Silva said.
While working hard and challenging oneself is a part of the club, another perk of joining is the ability to learn about a wide range of subjects and interact with those who teach them.
“You really get to know a lot of different professors from different fields,” De Silva says
“We have events where we would sit in and listen to a professor’s work. Or we would hear about some community projects that are going on,” he added.
The knowledge of different honors transfer programs was also something De Silva shared, stating:
“We have a lot of notifications from professors that will give us insight on special honors-related programs with different universities.”
According to De Silva, the UCLA Transfer Alliance Program (TAP) is one of many available programs.
He is also excited about the planning of the first Cabrillo Research Symposium, stating:
“For this event, we plan on getting any and all who are interested in presenting their research from any field like STEM, Humanities, or Language so we can show people at Cabrillo what research looks like for different fields of academics,” he said.
The Cabrillo Research Symposium is set to take place on April 10th, 2025, in the 450 building on the Aptos campus, with a room to be announced in the future, according to De Silva.
According to Kaitlyn Johnson, a biology major and public information officer for the Honors Transfer Club, the honors research symposium is supposed to be a stepping stone for students to learn how an event like the Bay Area Honors Symposium, an event for all honors students throughout the community colleges of California, is supposed to work.
The Honors Transfer Program is expected to have a change in management soon this year.
Scott-Curtis is set to leave her post as director of the Honors Program in Fall 2025 when Dr. Cheryl Chaffin will take over.
Scott-Curtis has spoken highly of Chaffin’s qualifications for the role, stating:
“She’s had many leadership positions at Cabrillo, and she’s very good at understanding how the college works and how to get things done.”
Scott-Curtis also elaborated on Chaffin’s history with the honors transfer program, “She’s been teaching in the honors program for several years.”
With the continued expansion of the Honors Transfer community at Cabrillo College, students are invited by the Honors Transfer Club administration to also partake in their activities.
“Anyone is welcome to come to a club meeting if anybody ever is curious about what it takes and what it entails to be an honors student, ” said Johnson.
The club meets every Wednesday from 2 pm to 3 pm in building 400 on the Aptos campus in Room 111 in the Honors Transfer Club lounge.
As for the future of the Honors Transfer Program, Scott-Curtis said, “We’re going to continue to grow. Our enrollment has increased, and the community knows about the honors program.”
For more information on club events on and off campus, the club offers their Instagram ID for the student body to observe: @honorstransferclubcc