Tuk-Tuks, Preparatory Academies, Weather Reports, Risk-taking, and Sheep Sex--Or, What Was on the Menu with Dinner with Phi Kappa Phi Award Recipients

Though the dinner on Friday, Aug. 6, was delicious – barbecue chicken, turkey and brisket, and cherry and apple cobbler – attendees at the gala ate up the most the speeches by Phi Kappa Phi awards recipients. The well-dressed crowd laughed heartily, wiped away tears and applauded enthusiastically.

Here’s why:

• Brianna Randall, a junior marketing major at University of Georgia, charmed the rapt audience with anecdotes about and video clips from her recent trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia, partially funded by a Phi Kappa Phi 2010 Study Abroad Grant.

She learned how to haggle with vendors with whom she didn’t share a common verbal language, so that meant pursing lips and raising eyebrows. Randall discovered that children who lived on floating villages kept boa constrictors for household pets; a 4-year-old boy, who knew little English other than the term “double dare,” helped her overcome a fear of snakes. And she jostled as if on a tiny roller coaster when transported on a three-wheeled “tuk-tuk,” a golf cart-type of mini bus pulled by a motorcycle.

• Darris Means, who runs the college-preparatory Elon Academy for talented but undeserved 10th-12th graders in Alamance County, N.C., reported to impressed listeners how his 2010 Phi Kappa Phi Literacy Grant underwrote a Book Jam to help students develop a love of reading.

The year-round institute, which will receive another Literacy Grant for 2011 for its collaboration with Elon University and its chapter, seems to be working. It combines three intensive four-week residential experiences at Elon University for high schoolers with financial need and/or no family history of higher education. One hundred percent of the first graduating class of 22 headed off to college.

• Oluseun Idowu declared to captivated attendees that his 2009 Love of Learning Award for educational pursuits “gave me the confidence of being able to compete with peers in the U.S.”

And compete, he does, Idowu explained. The husband, father of four and Nigerian weathercaster is pursuing an interdisciplinary doctorate in geosciences and mathematics at his chapter campus, University of Missouri-Kansas City. He applied his Love of Learning Award to attend a meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Washington, D.C. Idowu, whose research involves, among other topics, the impact of aerosol on the climate, said some of his numerous additional awards partly came about because Phi Kappa Phi “carries a lot of weight.”

• Rebecca Wettemann, a Fellowship recipient in 1995, and vice president of research and cofounder of Boston-based Nucleus Research, a software market analysis firm, urged people to take risks. The payoff is worth it, she declared.

She should know. Before Wettemann and team were around, there was no equivalent to Consumer Reports in the software industry, she explained. Now, there is. In fact, Nucleus Research is so trusted in investigative and financial analysis of technology that a few years ago Wettemann was billed as the most hated woman in the field, she revealed with a smile. Take risks like she did, Wettemann insisted, whether you’re 20 or 80. That’s how professional innovations occur, not to mention personal satisfactions.

• Taralyn Tan, who has just started a doctoral program in neuroscience at Harvard, provided spice for the regalement by proclaiming her interest in the “repertoire of reproductive behaviors in nature.” She can pursue her investigations further as one of three inaugural winners of a $15,000 Marcus L. Urann Fellowship this year.

Tan, whose chapter affiliation is Oregon State University, confessed that she has “sex on the brain.” What she meant: looking into the molecular events that prompt procreative activities. Pheromones play a part, she pointed out. What plays a part in her ongoing education is the Fellowship, she said, thanking the Society “for seeing potential in me.” Some of that potential? Understanding homosexual sheep. But that was a subject best left for after-dinner tete-a-tetes, she said.