Five University of Georgia students with connections to UGA Public Service and Outreach (PSO) received the 2024 Presidential Award of Excellence during the recent Presidential Honors Week Luncheon. The event was part of Honors Week—a weeklong series of events designed to recognize the achievements of the outstanding students, faculty, staff, and alumni at the University of Georgia. Student honorees include Sophia Gavalas, Khushi Mehta, Sophia Milazzo, Chase Reece and Logan Williamson.

The Presidential Award of Excellence recognizes students whose exceptional academic achievements and strong involvement in extracurricular activities distinguish them from their peers. For these five students, their extracurricular work helped carry out UGA’s public service pledge to make an impact on Georgia communities as the state’s land-grant and sea-grant institution. Less than 0.5 percent of the graduates of each college and school typically receive the Presidential Award of Excellence. We recently spoke with some of the awardees who are graduating this spring and captured their reflections on public service and their role with public service and outreach programs.

– Sophia Gavalas, of Dunwoody, Georgia, graduated with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology and philosophy. She will be attending medical school in the fall. Gavalas was a PSO Student Scholar in 2022-23 and worked as an intern at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia.

At the garden, she helped develop videos for the Native Plant symposium and the iNaturalist project. She also worked closely with Sean Cameron for adult education and Audrey Mitchell for children’s education, as well as the Learning by Leading at UGA team.

“I feel like my public service experiences were just local volunteer opportunities, and I didn’t understand that public service can take place outside of just community volunteering. The PSO Student Scholars program taught me how an institution like UGA, that has resources and people willing to contribute to public service, is able to identify needs in the community and in the state as a whole and then allocate those resources to address those needs. That really impacted my view of public service. I also learned how public service isn’t just about necessarily helping another community or another person, but it’s about empowering them from within. The Student Scholars program really shed light on that, especially through like the Archway Partnership and how much work that they’ve done to really empower these communities from within.”

– Sophia Milazzo of Rochester, New York, graduated with bachelor’s degrees in psychology and religion. She was a PSO Student Scholar in 2021-22 and worked as an intern at Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant.

During her time at Marine Extension, Milazzo helped develop a website that summarized the efforts of the Tybee Island community to combat sea level rise and worked on a human health study in Brunswick that examined a Superfund site exposure.

“The PSO Student Scholars program emphasizes public service as a responsibility that the University of Georgia has to Georgia being a land-grant university but it’s more than that because UGA is this hub of knowledge and research and innovation, and there’s all this really important work that’s being done here. The program makes you think about how to translate that into improving communities and utilizing the resources to grow this research and innovation. It teaches you how to make sure that the community is benefiting from it and that you’re using it to develop the community. We got to see the impressive reach that UGA has across the state. That is something really inspiring that most students don’t see when they’re just here in Athens.”

– Chase Reece of Hiawassee, Georgia, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in health promotion and a minor in biomedical physiology as part of the Double Dawg program. He is pursuing his master’s degree in health policy with plans to attend medical school. Reece was a PROPEL (Planning Rural Opportunities for Prosperity and Economic Leadership) Rural Scholar in 2022-23 at the Carl Vinson Institute of Government where he worked with rural communities to develop creative, evidence-based solutions to meet community needs. He also was a student worker at the Archway Partnership.

“I view public service as both a responsibility and a great privilege. The opportunity to give back to the communities throughout our state while helping address some of their most critical needs has been one of my highlights during my time at UGA. I am grateful to be at a university that is committed to using its resources to serve the people of Georgia while also giving so many students the opportunity to be part of its public service and outreach mission. As an aspiring physician with a desire to improve the health of rural areas, I have closely witnessed the importance of public service and always prioritizing the needs of the community over personal interests. However, public service is not limited to specific roles or professions. Rather, it is something that each of us can be engaged in daily in whatever role or capacity we are in by committing to make a positive difference through showing empathy, integrity, and responsibility towards one another.”

– Logan Williamson of Athens, Georgia, graduated with bachelor’s degrees in economics, international affairs, political science and Spanish. He was a PSO Student Scholar in 2021-22, serving as an Alumni Mentor in the program in 2023-24, and was an intern at the Carl Vinson Institute of Government.

At the Institute of Government, Williamson worked primarily with data analysis and data visualization for broadband access in Georgia. He created snapshots of commercial and residential broadband access in preparation for broadband infrastructure funding.

“My experience showed me that any institution can have a mission to give back. A university doesn’t have to provide only an education. It can help students grow in all areas of their life and to give them a perspective that their work goes beyond them and can have an impact on the community around them. Learning that institutions can have that secondary mission to give back in a sustainable way was kind of inspiring about PSO Student Scholars. It helped me realize that public service in the real world is working with communities, and communities working together for the greater good and to move themselves forward to a more prosperous future.”