ICC Student Elected to International Position

ORLANDO, FL ― With well more than two million members, the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society is the largest honor society in the world, and now for just the third time in PTK’s 96-year history, an Illinois Central College student has been elected one of its five international officers.

On April 26 at the annual PTK convention, students from around the country voted to select ICC student Trevor Mileur to hold the office of PTK Division III International Vice President. This will place Mileur in a supervisory role over 12 states and 307 registered PTK chapters across the midwestern US according to the PTK website.

“Trevor ran against five others in this election and was recognized Saturday for winning his election,” said Lauren Hoffert, PTK secretarial director at ICC, during ICC’s Student Recognition Evening on April 30. “Serving as an international officer is the pinnacle of student leadership within Phi Theta Kappa.”

“I think everyone at the convention could tell that he wasn’t just going to focus on one chapter or another but instead would do what was best for all of the students in his region,” said Megan Small, PTK public relations director at ICC, of Mileur’s successful campaign.

Before being elected to this position, Mileur was serving a one-year term a president of PTK’s Illinois region, which contains 57 chapters according to PTK directories.

Mileur’s plans for his term, which began the week he was elected, largely revolve around creating connections between chapters across the midwest by creating more fluid communication between state regions.

“What happens is you create these borders to the regions, you’ve got all these different borders, but with that you create barriers,” said Mileur. “If you can get headquarters, regions and different chapters communicating with each other on the border, you create more of a cohesiveness between the regions and the division, and then you strengthen the division overall.”

Now that Mileur has reached the highest Phi Theta Kappa position that he will ever hold as a student member, he can reflect on how he has come to see the PTK experience as “more than just learning and transfer scholarships.”

“Initially when I joined Phi Theta Kappa it was kind of just a thing to put on my resume,” said Mileur. “Then once I started being around people from Phi Theta Kappa, I realized it’s much more than that. It’s a very diverse family. We all come from different backgrounds and Phi Theta Kappa is this mesh that holds us together. And we move forward and seek out new opportunities and seek out basically to change the world.”

His election comes exactly thirty years after the first time an ICC student was elected to this level of PTK’s administration. In 1984, ICC student Matt Jones was elected to the same position as Mileur, then known as PTK North Central Vice President.

Thirty years later, Jones, a Peoria-area resident and administrator for the State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor, still feels the benefits of his PTK experiences.

“I wouldn’t have my wife without Phi Theta Kappa,” said Jones. “I wouldn’t be the leader that I am in my organization. I have become a prosecutor where I work and in the National Association of Prosecutor Coordinators, where I serve as the national secretary. I wouldn’t be where I am if not for the lessons learned through Phi Theta Kappa.”

“I went in as a young man with a lot of political ambitions who had been involved with student government and a number of other things,” said Jones. “I went in with the attitude that I was going change the organization and what happened was the organization changed me.”