The Sellinger Scholars, Loyola’s Business School Honors Society, is approaching the 20th year of their program. Since its inception, the program has doubled in size, observed a growing role for students running the program, and they now seek to reconnect with past scholars to connect current undergraduates with alumni.
The Sellinger Scholars is focused on fostering leadership skills and providing experiential learning experiences. Last summer, students who are part of the program created the Scholars Society, a student-run associate program focused on building a sense of community between the scholars.
The academic program handles all the classes and academic support for students, while the student-run Scholars Society program is more focused on holding events, running a mentoring program, and attempting to build a sense of community between the scholars.
I spoke with Economics Professor Lynne Elkes, the Academic Director for the Sellinger Scholars.
“[The Scholars Society are] creating a milliard of connections, hopefully, between all the cohorts. Now again, remember they just started this thing last summer, so this year has really been a practice run, seeing what works, seeing what doesn’t work, and it will be refined as we go forward,” Elkes said.
In addition to the benefits they currently have, the Scholars Society hopes to provide scholars with a large networking base and potential mentors by reconnecting with the alumni that have gone through the program in the last 20 years.
Abby Holthaus ‘25 is a member of the student executive board for the Scholars Society and the incoming vice president for next year. A development that Holthaus is excited about is that the 2027 class of Sellinger Scholars is the first with at least 50% women in the program’s recent history.
“As a female in the business world in general, it definitely is a very male dominated space. A lot of the narratives are told by the people in the space, which are predominantly men, so I think just increasing the number of women that feel supported in this environment is huge, and it’s awesome that we’re not only elevating the next business leaders, but we’re elevating the next business leaders who are going to also be women,” Holthaus said.
The Sellinger Scholars focus on experiential learning as opposed to more typical methods. The members of the program take classes with other Sellinger Scholars in their class every semester, in a similar experience to Messina. With the recent expansion of the program to include first-years, incoming scholars’ Messina classes are made up of other members of the program.
For Holthaus, experiential learning is the most vital part of the Sellinger Scholars program, as it gives students real world experience in business early on in their college careers. The most influential experiential learning experience in her personal experience happened in her freshman year.
“As freshmen [the class of 2025] came in, we worked alongside a non-profit and created an entire strategic plan and a budget for a building that they had acquired that they didn’t know how to manipulate into a profit generating business to pay for their schools. That was a project right off the bat that they got as freshmen that not a lot of freshmen would have access to,” Holthaus said.
Part of the reason the anniversary is so important to the Sellinger Scholars leadership is that all these vital changes to improve their program are coalescing around the 20th anniversary. In the view of Matthew Rogers ‘26, president of the Scholars Society, this is also happening at a time of great change in the world, and he hopes these changes improve the program to support its members the best it possibly can.
“We’re at such a significant time in the world. I mean Loyola’s changing, the world’s changing, everything’s changing and I think that the program has evolved so much in this ever changing world for the better,” Rogers said.
