Nunally Benzing leads Honors students through UGA’s Latin American Ethnobotanical Garden in October. (Stephanie Schupska/UGA)

Editor’s note: Parts of this story were featured in the 2024 edition of the Honors magazine.

Honors students are used to learning over lunch in Moore Hall through donor-funded Lunchbox Lectures that feature various UGA faculty. In 2022, Kora Burton and Maria de Rocher started brainstorming ways to both feed students and take them to little-visited parts of campus.

Kora is a student affairs professional, and Maria is assistant dean and director of student engagement and programming in the Morehead Honors College.

Lunch and learn field trips are the newest offering on a menu of extracurricular learning options available to Honors students. Honors College staff served up five on-campus trips in 2023.

“It all started in fall 2022 when we asked UGA’s Virtual Environment Room and Gaming Experience (VERGE) lab to come give a Lunchbox Lecture, and they asked, ‘Why not come to us instead?’” Kora said. “After that amazing field trip experience, we decided we wanted to continue asking this question as we planned for future lectures. UGA houses so many phenomenal spaces and research initiatives, covering so many disciplines. We knew we needed to help our students branch out and experience more of them during their limited time here.”

Zach Leggio holds up a peanut dress designed by Frankie Welch and worn by Rosalyn Carter during Jimmy Carter’s run for Georgia governor in 1973 during a 2023 trip to the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries. (Stephanie Schupska/UGA)

Lunch is typically a burrito—chicken, steak, veggie, or vegan—tortilla chips, salsa, a cookie, and a drink. The learn part ranges from the Maker’s Space in Barrow Hall to the Sanders Boardroom in Dean Rusk Hall—part of the School of Law—to the collection space behind secure doors at the Georgia Museum of Art.

The latest lunch and learn field trip was held Oct. 4, 2024, at UGA’s Latin American Ethnobotanical Garden with Nunally Benzing, the garden’s curator. The garden visit featured everything from the tiniest tomatoes to cotton blossoms to culantro (an herb that tastes like cilantro but has bigger leaves) to a visible example of the three sisters (corn, bean and squash) growing together. Students were able to smell and taste their ways through the gardens.

In 2023, the lunch and learn field trip offerings were:
• UGA Libraries. On Nov. 2, 2023, Honors students received a personalized look at the inner workings of and the opportunities available through the UGA Libraries system. During the information session and tour of the Main Library on North Campus, they were joined by Chandler Christoffel, interim head of research and instruction; Susan Morris, head of interlibrary loans; Kelly Holt, head of cataloging; Andrew Johnson, emerging technologies librarian; and Callie Holmes, digital archivist and digitization unit head of the Brown Media Archives.
• School of Law. On Oct. 18, 2023, Honors students met with Shannon Hinson, associate director of admissions, and Logan Sawyer, J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law and director of undergraduate studies, as they discussed law school and the law minor, as well as the unique admissions programs and scholarship opportunities for Honors students.
• Georgia Museum of Art. On Sept. 27, 2023, Callan Steinmann, curator of education, gave a presentation over lunch about the museum and its resources. Students took a tour of the galleries, followed by a behind-the-scenes visit to the vaults, led by Tricia Miller, head registrar. Both an academic museum and the official art museum of the state of Georgia since 1982, the Georgia Museum of Art provides a wide range of campus and community programming.
• Barrow Hall’s creative spaces. On Sept. 14, 2023, students were introduced to creative spaces that work seamlessly for students in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences to engage in various fashion design research, including historic design inquiry, user-centered design, digital printing fabric testing, and more.
• Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries. During the visit on Feb. 8,2023, Kathryn Manis, instruction and community engagement librarian, and Jan Levinson Hebbard, exhibition coordinator, guided students on a tour of the vault and galleries. They were joined in the vault by Paul Van Wicklen, vault manager. Opened in 2012, the Special Collections Libraries’ mission is to acquire, organize, preserve, and provide access to unique and rare materials related to the history and culture of Georgia.

“One of our students who went on the Special Collections tour, Gabrielle Gruszynski, is now working there as a docent because of that experience,” Kora said. “It’s just wonderful to hear that this new menu of programming has had that effect.”

– By Stephanie Schupska