Graduate Honors & Awards

Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award

This award is given by the Graduate School to Baylor graduate students who serve as Teachers of Record and who are recognized for their outstanding teaching by students and faculty. This person is selected by a committee of graduate faculty and graduate students as one of Baylor's outstanding instructors. Winners of this award are selected based on recommendations from their supervising faculty, evaluations and recommendations from their students, their teaching philosophy, and their participation in professional teaching development.

Michael Ryan, Spring 2023
Rebecca Bonhag, Spring 2021
Amanda Hernandez, Fall 2019
Kenneth Vaughan, Fall 2018
James Davidson, Spring 2018
Justin Nelson, Fall 2016
Todd Ferguson, Fall 2014
Brandon Martinez, Spring 2014
Joshua Tom, Fall 2013
Shanna Granstra, Fall 2011
Andrew Whitehead, Fall 2010

Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award

The Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award is open to any doctoral or MFA graduate student who has completed their candidacy requirement. Applicants are judged by their completed and /or ongoing research projects, participation in research events and conferences, presentations and publications, future research plans, and a letter of recommendation from a faculty mentor. The award is given in the areas of STEM, Social Sciences, and Humanities, for a total of 3 awards annually.

The OGSRA was started in 2019 with the goal of promoting the research productivity of graduate students, and changed in 2021 from a semester award to an annual award.

Steven Foertsch, 2022-2023

Honors and Other Awards

Doctoral Student Michael Lotspeich-Yadao Receives Research Grant

Doctoral student Michael Lotspeich-Yado, who was one of ten, received Knowledge Challenge Grant of $18,802 in 2020. This grant will help supports his research into "real-world problems facing entrepreneurs and their communities."

Doctoral Student Amanda Hernandez wins Student Research Award.

Doctoral student Amanda Hernandez has been given Student Research Award from a highly applicant competitive pool by the Scientific Study of Religion 2020 Student Research Grant Committee.

Katie Halbesleben Wins Master Paper Award

At the annual meeting of the Southwestern Sociological Association in New Orleans, Louisiana in March 2013, a Baylor graduate student won the outstanding student paper competition in the master's level. A call for student papers went out in the Fall of 2012 and all eligible student members of the SSA were encouraged to submit their papers. At the final meeting during the conference, the student paper competition awards were announced and the recipients were given a cash award and certificate. Congratulations to all Baylor Sociology graduate students on their success and excellent papers.
The Masters division was won by Katie Halbesleben with her paper, "Educational Attainment in Second Generation Immigrants: Creating Context for Predicting College Graduation."

Baylor Sociology Doctoral Student, Samuel Stroope Wins National Award for Research on Views of Scripture as Tied to Education Levels in Congregations

Doctoral student Samuel Stroope has been named recipient of an award given by the Association for the Sociology of Religion for outstanding student paper of the year. Stroope is the 2011 winner of the Robert J. McNamara Student Paper Award for his paper "Education and Religion: Individual, Congregational, and Cross-Level Interaction Effects on Biblical Literalism." Using a large national data set, the paper finds that an individual's view of the Bible as to be taken literally word-for-word is linked to an individual's educational attainment and that of his or her fellow congregants. Furthermore, education levels for the person and the congregation build upon one another to make the affirmation of biblical literalism less likely. The paper has been accepted for publication in the journal Social Science Research and will appear in the fall. The committee selected the paper "because it examined an interesting topic and had a strong discussion of the findings and implications," said Dr. Rachel Kraus, committee chair and associate professor of sociology at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. "In addition, Sam's paper had a strong structural component to the analysis and did an exceptionally good job attempting to explain, rather than describe, social phenomena using empirical data."