The President’s Commission on the Status of Women of Mississippi State University is accepting nominations through Feb. 17 for the 2010 Outstanding Women Awards Program.
The winners will be recognized at a banquet April 8 at 3 p.m. in Mitchell Memorial Library’s Grisham Room.
Mary McLendon, chair of President’s Commission on the the Status of Women, said the awards highlight a lot of the hard work women do.
“It is to recognize outstanding women on campus and in the community who may not normally get recognized,” she said.
Sheena Gardner, chair of public relations for the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, said the awards are always hard to decide on.
“Anyone who is willing to take the time to fill out the form out and go through the process, the nominee must be a pretty outstanding woman,” she said. “The women can be community oriented or people doing exceptionally well at their job.”
McLendon said some categories, such as faculty, get a lot of attention while a lot of other women get overlooked.
“It’s easy to forget some of the other categories,” she said. “We’re always looking for more women in the community, Mississippi, service/maintenance and technical/paraprofessional,” she said.
McLendon said the awards have been given out for over 30 years, but the committee still does not have as much participation as they would hope.
“Even though we’ve been done it so long, we feel not may people know about it,” she said.
Gardner said the number of nominations in the past has been a decent amount, but the committee hopes the events become more well-known.
“It’s my responsibility to increase people’s awareness as much as possible,” she said.
She said she encourages people to look at the committee’s Web site and their Facebook page for more information and for nomination packets.
“Almost anyone can fit into one of these categories,” she said.
Gardner said the women are nominated and then go through an interview process.
“People on the commission are assigned to one or two groups,” she said. “They read all the applications and rank them.”
Melanie Honeycutt, vice-chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, said the commission members will use a scoring matrix to determine the winners.
Honeycutt said each category will usually only have one winner, but in some cases there may be a category split.
“When unusual circumstances dictate, we will split up the faculty category,” she said.
McLendon said she always enjoys hearing what the nominators say about the recipients.
“It’s great to see all the work these women do,” she said.
Gardner said it is good encouragement for the women who get nominated.
“Even if they don’t win, it lets people know they’re doing a good job,” she said.
Honeycutt said the packets can be turned in via e-mail or three copies of the packets can be mailed to Mail Stop 9609 or delivered to 106 McArthur Hall.