Feature - Blair Martin, C'2026

Githii Issues

Blair Martin, C'2026

Throughout matriculation at Spelman, the focus on academics can cloud your view on all the aspects that make the full Spelman experience. To embrace and understand the value of both the academic and social opportunities, one most be able to find balance and make sure to capture and embrace the moment. We explore this with Blair Martin, a sophomore English major and Entrepreneurship and Innovation minor from Wisconsin, as she discuss her experience with finding her balance and bonding within the Honors program and how she transformed her passions into career goals during her experience.

One of the key components for the Ethel Waddell Githii Honors Program is developing an intellectual community both within and outside the program. First-years students are given the chance to bond by being put in the same dorm. Blair discusses her encounters and interactions with her Spelman sisters and what that meant to her.

Q. What does the honors program mean to you and how has it prepared you for your career goals, interests, and skills?

A. The program means a lot. I remember when I was applying I thought this seemed like it was fleshed out and had its specific niche within the campus community. I really appreciated that it wasn’t just a tagline added to a person’s title, but rather it’s something that you’re embedded in and interact in on several different levels throughout your matriculation. My first-year, it was really great being able to live with everybody and have that living-learning community where my peers, my classmates, and my “colleagues” were all kept in the same space. As far as professional development, I learned so much being in the community physically and intellectually with those people. Without this program, we wouldn’t have come together in that way.

I lived with a lot of health science majors and that is the complete opposite of my interest, but I learned so much about the simple things from a different viewpoint. Like how to get work done, prioritize, and how to think critically about the next steps because they have to go at their work in a completely different way and that gave me a lot of perspective in how I like to orient myself. Socially, it’s been lovely to have a group of people that have a similar passion in how we move throughout these spaces which comes from our similar interests in intellectual sovereignty. Thinking critically about what we want to do, how we are interested in doing it, and what we have to offer in the spaces we want to enter.

Without the lectures we were in, having it reiterated, [the development of how we think and operate now] would have been thrown to the waste side, especially since we aren’t raised to think in that specific way. For a lot of people, school is just a place to check your boxes and wash your hands of it. Being in a program like this really allowed us space to develop our thinking into what it is now.