A Blog on McConnell Center Life

A picture of my lock on the chains atop the South Peak of Hua Shan By Sarah Stovall, Class of 2014 This blog post is late. As “Head of Class,” the perfunctory title given to the Scholar chosen by the Center to be the “final word” on decisions while in China, I wanted to give the “final word” of our China blogs as well, summing up our experiences with my own reflections. This has proven to be much more difficult than I anticipated, and thus taken longer than I expected, simply because there are so many things I could say. I ran into a similar problem while climbing Mount Hua ( Hua Sh­­an ) near Xi’an in China. Hua Shan is one of China’s Five Great Mountains ( Wu Yue ), sacred mountains that are associated with the five cardinal directions of the Chinese tradition, which includes the center as a direction. Hua Shan is the West Great Mountain, an ancient destination for imperial pilgrimage known for the Taoist temples built upon it. There is a tradition for those who climb Hua Sha...

Victoria Allen Class of 2016 Whenever I talk about the McConnell Scholarship, the most important thing that I always stress is that it is not just a scholarship, or even a program. The program was designed to give the scholars a classic liberal arts education, while simultaneously being housed at a large research university, but it is so much more than that. Every tenet of the program is constructed around the core mission of the McConnell Program—Leadership, Scholarship, and Service. After completing my first year of the program, I can personally attest to the effectiveness of the Center’s goals. I have had the opportunity to experience and learn more in my first year than most undergraduates experience in four. One of the absolute best things about being a McConnell scholar is the expansive and inclusive alumni and mentor network that allows you to have access to. During my second semester as a freshman, I was offered the chance to intern with a former McConnell Scholar, ...