Christine Junker was a typical, goal-oriented Honors student. When she began her studies in Finance, she already had lined up a business she could take over when she graduated.
“But after my first semester I realized I didn’t want to take any business classes,” she says. “All the classes I wanted to take were in the humanities, so I switched to English education. Maude’s encouragement helped me to make that final decision to change. It was a wonderful decision for me.”
While still an undergraduate, Junker applied to a prestigious Breadloaf School of English summer program. “You take these fantastic classes with some of the best professors in the country,” Junker says, “so I applied for a session in Juneau because they had classes I wanted, and it was
a part of the country I’d never been to.”
Junker was particularly interested in a class entitled “Sustaining Indigenous Languages.” Although she was the only person in the class without hands-on experience in the topic, she had very positive response to a paper she wrote on the differences in the ways the native Tlingits and their language were treated by Russian Orthodox priests and Presbyterian missionaries.
“My professor (Courtney Cazden, the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education, Emerita, at Harvard University) was very impressed with that work,” Junker says. “I went back and read journals from that time. One of the Presbyterian missionaries published a newspaper, and drawing from that you could tell a lot about the treatment of the Native American language and culture.”
Junker is just starting the Ph.D. program at Michigan State University. Because she was accepted into the accelerated program, she will complete a year’s worth of study toward a master’s and continues toward a doctoral degree. She’ll be concentrating on 20th century literature, with an emphasis on creative nonfiction and her interest in nature writing.

Three early graduates of Honors embody a great range of interests. They represent the Honors Program as a whole—a group of young scholars who are, it’s fair to say, the cream of the crop. Click on their picture to hear their stories.

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