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| Frank Bencomo-Suarez Class of 2018 |
This year I had the honor of representing the University of Louisville as a student delegate to the 68th Student Council on United States Affairs or as it is more commonly known, SCUSA. SCUSA is held each year in the fall at the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York state. As a student delegates we spend 4 days and 3 nights at West Point where we slept in the barracks alongside cadets. We shared meals with them and exchanged questions about differing experiences between civilian and military colleges.
The main activity of SCUSA is to draft a policy proposal. This policy proposal is supposed to address a theme. For this year the theme was democratization. For this activity we were split into different groups. I was placed in the Technology and Democratization group . With the guidance of two leading professors in the field, a mixed team of cadets and students from colleges all over the nation took off writing a paper.
This was something certainly new to all of us, if not most of us. It required discussion, research, and collaboration to draw from all of our strengths. Through it all, we made friendships, exchanged ideas, and got to know the lives of cadets and vice-versa. A bridge was made in those short few days. A bridge between the lives of cadets and college students. To say that this does not happen enough would be an understatement. Whilst oftentimes the practicalities of pulling together these two worlds maybe be a deterrent, we do both ourselves and the future a massive disservice when we fail to bring together the future military and civilian leaders together. We are all developing our skills and specialities in parallel. Bringing them together shows us what we all have to contribute to the table. Someday down the line when I have to speak to our military to discuss international policy, I will look back fondly on those few days at West Point and enter the conversation with optimism of what everyone can do to better the world. That is the true value of SCUSA, building bridges between the future of civilian leadership and the future of military leadership so that we may better work together to solve our problems and reinforce our strengths. If the history of America has taught us anything, it is that we are strongest in our diversity of ideas and viewpoints than we will ever be otherwise.
Frank Bencomo-Suarez, of Louisville, Ky., is a junior McConnell Scholar studying political science.