A Blog on McConnell Center Life

Kieran Waigel ('22) My family gatherings have always been quite unorthodox. Most Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays have been spent solely with my parents and sister here in the US. There are no large family gatherings because our family lives 8000+ miles away in a small village in Germany and a bustling urban city in India. This distance means that we travel a lot. Traveling for me has always been a way to meet with my family. Hopping on a plane across the ocean never meant visiting a new place or taking a relaxing vacation, it meant going back home, or at least to another home. It is a yearly tradition, going through hundreds of airline sites trying to find the cheapest fare to get us across the Atlantic for as long as possible.              When I thought of travel, I did not think of exploring new places, eating new foods, or meeting new people. The places were new the first time I went, but then they were home. The ...

Austin Dillon ('22) One year ago today, I had never traveled outside the borders of the contiguous United States. At the time, my visualization of travel abroad involved soothing travel and relaxed vacationing. Little did I know that in a few short months, that perception would be shattered when I traveled to Kolkata, India. Throughout the first semester of my senior year, I was involved in a water quality research project through the University of Kentucky and the U.S. State Department’s Mission to India. Multiple schools in both India and Kentucky participated, and the team from each country with the highest-scored research proposal would be given the opportunity to present their research in an exchange with the other country. For our project, my team and I researched the health risks associated with our local groundwater wells. After countless hours spent collecting samples, conducting tests, and writing drafts, we submitted our work for final revi...

Leah Hazelwood ('22) --> March 16 th , 2018, two things came in the mail with my name on them. One, my passport, very important. Two, a letter from the McConnell Center, more important. This letter would determine my future, where I would spend the next four years of my life, the quality of education I would receive, the people I would meet, everything. I was beyond excited when I opened my letter and saw the words “Dear Ms. Hazelwood…it is my pleasure to offer you a position”, I cried, I screamed, my mom even recoded video to remember the moment, but I was immediately filled with this sense of dread. Not because I feared the future but because I had a feeling this letter had my name on it by accident. Was I intelligent? Yes. Was I “McConnell” intelligent? No. Was I talented? Somewhat. Was I “McConnell” talented? Definitely not. All these terrible questions swirled around in my head about how in the world I received a scholarship as great as this one. I had...

Will Randolph ('22) As the sun crept down behind a fog covered tree line on a mid-October evening, I realized I had truly ended up in the middle of nowhere. I was sitting in a half-bent plastic chair, carefully placed in a row inside a wooden cabin with creaky floors and a boarded up fireplace, along with one hundred other exhausted college students. We had all arrived the night before at Camp Loucon, an isolated church camp in Grayson County that would serve as our home for the weekend. We had all gathered in this remote place for Sojourn College’s, the campus ministry for Sojourn Church, annual Fall Retreat. Our arrival at the campground was preceded by weeks of excitement and fanfare from upperclassmen who had made the trip before. As a freshman, I was eager to experience the respite and spiritual fulfillment that I had heard so much about.  Shortly after our arrival, Our congregation sat and patiently waited for the band to start playing. After the music put us a...

Laura Hinkle ('22) The United States has made drastic strides in enfranchising American citizens in the past 230 years, from the 18 th century qualifications of being a white, male property owner to current inclusivity of almost every American citizen through the passage of six voting-related amendments. This evolution promotes the basic principles of Republicanism, in that Americans are able to express their views on parties, platforms, and policies by electing politicians to represent them. Yet there is a group of American citizens, numbering around four million, who have not been given full voting privileges— those that live in the American territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, United States Virgin Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands. Should citizens in United States territories have the right to vote in presidential elections? The justification for a lack of voting rights dates to the 1904 Insular Case Downes v. Bidwell , a Supreme Court decision that stated: “If [A...

As a high school senior, it is a guarantee that you will be asked the question, “So, where are you going to college?” This question will come from anyone and everyone. Obviously, for me the answer was the University of Louisville. However, I didn’t think I would ever hear those words coming out of my mouth. In my mind, I didn’t see U of L at the level of my dream schools. My mind was convinced I had to get away from Kentucky if I was going to be challenged by college, I had to go out of state to really experience what I needed to be successful. This is a common idea in Kentucky, referred to as the Brain Drain. After committing to the University of Louisville, I would tell people my decision and often received a confused face. I still see that face to this day when I see some people on campus I knew in high school. Soon after usually comes a, “I thought you would go somewhere… else.” A year ago, I would have said the exact same thing.  But now, those words break my heart....

Nomophobia, or the fear of being without your mobile phone, is a new phenomenon that has arisen in the 21 st century. In not just the American culture, but also the global culture, mobile phone addiction has become a pervasive trend in recent years. Nomophobia could be potentially devastating to the mental health of an exponentially growing cellphone consumer base, so psychologists and researchers have committed to try and understand how the condition should be classified and treated. I want to bring awareness to the issue by exploring how it is defined in the medical community, how prevalent the addiction is in society, and how experts are dealing with the condition.   YouGov, a UK-based research organization, coined the term “no-mobile-phone phobia” during a 2008 study where it found that out of a sample of 2,163 British people, “58% of men and 47% of women suffer from the phobia, and an addition 9% feel stressed when their mobile phones are off.” In the academic journa...

Grayson Ford ('21) So far this semester, my favorite course has been POLS 390–political research. A concept discussed in a recent class has made me consider how students think about politics on college campuses today. My professor defined this concept, psychological bias, as the “tendency to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment.” While my professor introduced this concept to highlight how individuals have faulty judgements in research, I think it is also relevant to today’s political atmosphere on campus. Students are now encouraged to talk to one another about conflicting viewpoints about the world and politics today. However, it seems today students have little or no interest in being proven wrong or having ideas challenged. Instead, it seems everyone opposed to a certain viewpoint is either a bigot or a snowflake depending on their stance.   But, why is this seemingly useless mindset...

Malcomb Haming ('21) The application of the First Amendment on college campuses is consistently an issue. Every year, there are stories all over the nation regarding Universities disinviting speakers as a result of outcry from the faculty and staff. Besides the occasional destruction of a handful of TPUSA signs when I was a Freshman, I have seen virtually no signs of censorship at the University of Louisville. Maintaining this level of free expression leaves all students better off; we should all come to college for the purposes of broadening our horizons.  I went to a conservative, Catholic, primarily white, all boys high school. While in College I found meeting people who were different from me to be illuminating. However, it was no where near as enlightening as talking to people with different ideas and values than my own. Diversity is an important pillar of all Universities, but without including a broad diversity of ideas that pillar is a hollow one. Racist, misog...