Debbie Killips is proof that Honors students don’t just live inside their heads.
In her senior year, Killips was Ferris State’s leading women’s basketball scorer with 15.7 points per game. She also is the school’s career steals leader with 312, and is the ninth player in school history to record 1,000 career points.
She managed this while working on a degree in applied biology and earning a cumulative 3.92 GPA.
Thanks to both her athletic and academic skills, Killips was awarded the University’s first National Collegiate Athletic Association Postgraduate Scholarship. Killips is studying this fall on a one-time, non-renewable grant of $5,000 in Ferris State’s College of Optometry program. She was one of just 11 NCAA Division II student-athletes to receive the prestigious award.
You might not expect a successful athlete to point to the Honors’ requirement of volunteer hours and attendance at cultural events as a real strength of the program, but Killips does.
“There are Honors programs at other universities that only focus on academics,” she says. “The Honors Program at Ferris really involves your whole being, your whole personality, becoming a well-rounded individual through involvement in the community. It takes you out of your comfort zone and challenges you. I really enjoyed that.”
As for many Honors students, the program became a way of life. “I absolutely loved it,” Killips says. “The best thing about it was the people. Some of my best friends are from the Honors program.” And for Killips, more than friends. She and fellow Honors student Doug Searles were married in Big Rapids on June 15.
Killips hopes to continue stretching herself by joining outreach programs that Optometry students and faculty have been involved with over the last several years, including mission trips to Haiti and Guyana, and providing vision screening at the Special Olympics.
“I also plan on being involved in basketball as one of the team’s biggest fans,” Killips adds.

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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