A Blog on McConnell Center Life

By Kevin Grout , Class of 2016 Grout and fellow interns on the Speaker's balcony of the U.S. Capitol After my 2014 summer working in Washington D.C., I knew that I wanted to go back.  I wanted to move closer to the government itself after working in a think tank last summer, and I knew there would be no better place for me than the office of Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader.  It was an honor to work for Leader McConnell, and the experience complemented my University of Louisville education. For six weeks, I lived in a small dorm room at the Catholic University of America and commuted to the Russell Senate Office Building.  The office paired each of the legislative interns with a legislative correspondent in a specific policy area.  By the luck of the draw, I had the opportunity to work on foreign policy, defense, and veterans’ affairs.  Each day, I sorted through the Leader’s incoming mail on each of these issues, and I began to draft respon...

By  Hannah Wilson , Class of 2017 Hannah Wilson Class of 2017 There is a misconception about college life that I’d like to clear up now. It’s what seniors in high school dream about and recent graduates look back on with great nostalgia. College: the fraction of a moment where one experiences unprecedented freedom, accompanied by a kind of responsibility that requires unprecedented maturity. It is the finding of oneself, the incessant chore of realizing that the world is so utterly different than one could have imagined, that people originate from every nook and cranny of the universe and all somehow end up here, in this place, with these ideas and dreams and pasts that have whittled away at them and created something irreplaceable, something unable to be replicated. It is a time of imagination, discovery, and beauty. And unfortunately fringed with magnitudes of disappointment. And this is precisely what no one likes to talk about. I woke up on New Years Da...

By Phillip Lentsch, Class of 2018 Phillip Lentsch Class of 2018 I am a proud member of the Millennial Generation, a cohort rooted in the threads of the World Wide Web.  Throughout my whole life, I can always recall the presence of some form of a computer or smart phone near me: my first GameCube, a Nintendo DS, an iPhone, an iPad, etc.  It’s easy to try to downplay the influence technology has had on my life, but instead, I’ve been continuously seeking to acknowledge its power. This semester, I enrolled in POLS 362, otherwise known as Contemporary Political Economy.  Despite the dense course title, this class--and specifically the professor, Dr. Abbott--has completely revamped my view of the world.  As the first five weeks of school have trudged along, we have examined the effects that globalization and the Information Revolution have had on the international market, both positive and negative.  Because of the Internet’s ability to connect the world in...

By Kyle Hilbrecht, Class of 2018 This summer, I was afforded the opportunity to attend a Liberty Fund conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. Although we had valuable discussions about the visions of the American founding through the writings of Jefferson, Madison, Washington, and Hamilton, one of the most insightful experiences I had on the trip was due to the relationships I created with many of the Teacher-Scholars.  First off, I was taken aback by how open and friendly these teachers were. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that these high school and grade school teachers existed in the same realm socially as I do. That is to say that, my sense of humor, interests pop culturally, musically, and otherwise all come from the age that I am, and I had disassociated them from myself on the basis of teachers just being teachers. What I failed to recognize was that some of those same teachers were no more than ten years older than I am. I got to see these teachers as you...