Amy Eckhardt

Director of National Scholarship and International Programs

BA with Honors, The Pennsylvania State University

MSL, University of Pittsburgh School of Law

Office
3600 Cathedral of Learning

Phone
412-624-6881

Fax
412-624-6885

Amy Eckhardt is a passionate advocate for honors education with more than 17 years of experience with honors programs at Indiana University, Penn State University, and the University of Pittsburgh from the perspectives of a student and then a university employee.

In her work with students, Eckhardt seeks to be flexible, creative, and encouraging of students’ initiatives by connecting them with the resources and opportunities to guide and empower them to discover and fulfill their potential.

Eckhardt is also an enthusiastic proponent of all things international and serves as the unofficial UHC cheerleader for study abroad. She has lived, studied, and taught abroad in Peru, England, Italy, Israel, and Slovakia (including a stint in the Peace Corps) and speaks Spanish, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Slovak.

As director of National Scholarships and International Programming at the University Honors College (UHC) at Pitt, Eckhardt divides her time between improving our success in prestigious extramural scholarship competitions and on promoting Pitt’s goals in international honors study. In addition to advising and assisting students in the application process for specific scholarships, Eckhardt also works with students in very early stages of their undergraduate education to help them figure out the best opportunities for them and strategies for meeting their personal and academic goals. Pitt students are regularly selected for interviews for all the major nationally and internationally competitive scholarships and in the past five years have won three Marshall Scholarships, 10 Goldwaters, four Trumans, three Udalls, a Rhodes, and a Churchill.

The success of Pitt students is attributable in part to their own quality but also to a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach to advising and mentoring students. Eckhardt has sought to incorporate very specific advising for scholarships into a larger, more general goal of helping students get the most out of their undergraduate experience. To that end, she sees her current role as an academic matchmaker, who links students with faculty and opportunities throughout the University that will lead to intellectual, social, and personal development in and out of the classroom. Eckhardt also seeks to identify and create new programming that will address the specialized needs of talented and motivated students.

Eckhardt’s most recent programmatic initiatives have focused on ways that international studies can provide rigor and distinctive opportunities for undergraduates, an example of which is the new honors research-based degree entitled the Bachelor of Philosophy in international and area studies. This degree incorporates advanced language study, research in global and area studies, and scholarship abroad in the context of a traditional degree in a discipline.

In addition, the UHC’s Mongolian Field Studies Program, which brings students and faculty to Mongolia in the summertime, is a comprehensive example of how good advising, programming, and mentoring enrich an honors education.

Eckhardt works individually with students to develop well articulated research or internship proposals that ensure a feasible, valid summer project and lead to success in securing internal and external funding for their study abroad to Mongolia. In the past five years, seven students have won Freeman Asia Scholarships for this program. According to the students themselves, participation in this program is one of the best experiences of their undergraduate studies and has directly contributed to their success in the Truman, Udall, Fulbright, Rotary International, and David L. Boren Scholarship competitions.