Graduate with Honor and Distinction: In 1928 our Pi Gamma Mu Honorary President, Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, carried our Pi Gamma Mu flag to the Antartic in his famous exploration trip of adventure because he believed in honoring outstanding students. Today we are celebrating 86 years of honoring outstanding students!

Franklin, NC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 07/27/2010 -- PI GAMMA MU International Honor Society for the Social Sciences - Recognizing your outstanding social-science students! (Celebrating 86 Years)

Please, may we have a moment of your time to tell you why you, as a social-science professor or student, would find a chapter of Pi Gamma Mu beneficial to you, your students, and your college or university?

The members of the Board of Trustees of Pi Gamma Mu International Honor Society invite you to consider the formation of a Pi Gamma Mu chapter at your college or university. We issue this invitation based on our own experience at our schools, where Pi Gamma Mu chapters encourage interdisciplinary thinking about society, humanity, and public affairs. Pi Gamma Mu recognizes academic excellence in the fields of anthropology, criminal justice, economics, cultural geography, history, international relations, social philosophy, psychology, social work, sociology, political science, psychology and many interdisciplinary areas. Our mission is to encourage and promote excellence in the social sciences and to uphold the ideals of scholarship and service.

Pi Gamma Mu was founded in 1924 at the College of William & Mary in Virginia and Southwestern College in Kansas. The honor society is a member of, and provides leadership to, the national Association of College Honor Societies. Our members have included President Lyndon B. Johnson, anthropologist Margaret Mead, Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin, U. S. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, and Harvard University sociology-department founder Pitirim Sorokin.

Here is what Pi Gamma Mu tries to do for you, your students, and your college or university that we believe will be beneficial to you:

Each initiate receives lifetime membership, an elegant membership certificate (comparable in quality to college diplomas), a membership card, a lapel pin, the online Pi Gamma Mu Newsletter, and a one-year subscription to our well-regarded journal, the International Social Science Review (ISSR). Students may order honor cords for graduation.

A Pi Gamma Mu chapter is an effective way for you and your colleagues to recognize your most accomplished social-science students--an appropriate way to thank your honor students for their commitment and to encourage other students to emulate their dedicated classmates. All too often, honor students whose professors do not arrange for their initiation into an honor society receive no recognition at all for their achievement! Do you want your students to receive honor cords for graduation?

One multidisciplinary honor society can be easier to administer than many smaller groups.

Our multidisciplinary approach allows people in various disciplines/majors to socialize with and learn from each other. If your college’s social-science faculty members are separated into various departments, a Pi Gamma Mu chapter can be the stimulus for interdepartmental gatherings of professors and/or students. Would you like to get a stimulating speaker for such a gathering? Pi Gamma Mu will contribute $300 to help you pay an honorarium! Some Pi Gamma Mu chapters operate social-service projects, so you can easily recruit collaborators to help implement such projects if service learning is a priority for you. (It's a priority to us, too, and every international convention features a social-service project.)

Encouraging your students to present their excellent research papers at Pi Gamma Mu conventions can help jump-start your best students’ desire to pursue a graduate degree—and Pi Gamma Mu will often help pay for some of their travel expenses. Pi Gamma Mu holds an international convention every three years. By design, our conventions are student-oriented. The October 2011 triennial international convention will be held in the Washington, D. C., metropolitan area. Students establish bonds with other students from colleges and universities all over the United States and other countries as well.

Pi Gamma Mu offers a scholarship program in which student members compete for funding for graduate school. Every year, we present three scholarships for $2000 each and seven scholarships for $1000 each, for one year of graduate study. Any member of the society is eligible to apply as a graduating senior or as a prospective graduate student.

Students (as well as professors) have an opportunity to publish in an international journal. Virtually every edition of the International Social Science Review contains the work of at least one chapter sponsor and at least one student member of the honor society, and publishers have asked and received permission to reprint student-written articles in other widely distributed publications.

A Pi Gamma Mu chapter can be invigorating for you, your students, and your college in all of these very significant ways.

Starting a Pi Gamma Mu chapter is not difficult at all, and we'll guide you through the process. If you send an E-mail message to our executive director Sue Watters at pgm@sckans.edu , or call her at (620) 221-3128, she will give you a call and/or mail some easy-to-follow information to you, along with a copy of the ISSR. And please visit our Web site at http://www.pigammamu.org/start-chapter.html or http://www.pigammamu.org/ to learn more about our honor society.

Help us to do a better job as the social-science honor society by giving us the name of a colleague who you think might be interested in being a chapter sponsor. Students also help establish chapters at colleges and universities.

We deeply appreciate your kindness in taking a few moments to read this message. We appreciate our International Vice President, Dr. Barry Friedman, who helped us edit and prepare this release from Pi Gamma Mu documents. Best regards from all of us at Pi Gamma Mu. Call our headquarters at (620)-221-3128 for additional information or guidance on starting a chapter.

Gordon Mercer is international president of Pi Gamma Mu International Honor Society and a professor at Western Carolina University. Marcia Mercer is a writer and columnist for the Franklin Press.