A Blog on McConnell Center Life

By Laura Hinkle I’ve recently discovered how incredibly easy it is to find yourself disenchanted with college. Whether consciously or not, I, like so many of my peers, had fallen deep into the dreaded “sophomore slump”. My ambitions were slowly waning, and I started to settle for the bare minimum. I honestly didn’t realize how far I’d dropped into this dangerous mindset until this past week at the annual Naval Academy Leadership Conference (NALC). The conference’s theme of mentorship hit home in a way that was deeply personal and inspiring. As I type this on the plane back to Louisville, it’s hard for me to put into words how I feel. NALC touched me to the core, in a way that I can only describe as a recalibration of my perspective and aspirations.  Growing up, I’d never thought about mentorship as a formal concept. Finding true mentors has always been hard for me because I can be strong-willed and independent to a fault. I’ve always preferred to take the road les...

By Isabella Martin Leaders come in many forms.  “A leader is one who influences others by their actions and thoughts, whether they know it or not.”  I recently gave a speech about leadership at my local church’s Confirmation retreat.   The purpose of my talk was to relate my personal experiences to different types of leaders and ultimately express the importance of spreading God’s leadership.  My entire life, I’ve struggled with the concept of religion.   It was not until this year that I came to the conclusion that there is a difference between religion and faith.   I said in my speech, “I have struggled with my faith my entire life.   I was able to find religion eventually, but the path has been nothing short of rocky.”  I never felt the “knock on the heart door” or “pull at the heartstrings” that I thought I was supposed to.   I always thought that my relationship with God had to be somewhat linear.   Linear meaning t...

By Bella Beilman Imagine you are sitting in a conference room with 24 other people talking about a common and extremely divisive topic. Most of you are admittedly undergraduate subject experts on the topic, everyone but one even speaking an uncommon foreign language linked to the topic. As you sit around a square of tables looking at each other, you begin to realize that every single person in the room has an extremely varied past. There were students from California, Kentucky, Georgia, South Korea, and even Iran. At SCUSA (Student Conference for United States’ Affairs), held at the United States Military Academy, this year, I was a part of the Middle East and Northern Africa discussion table. I suppose I should have assumed that if you willingly sign up to talk about the Middle East and Northern Africa for three days, you probably are informed and passionate about the region. However, I didn’t realize the importance of the order of events at the conference until I was ...

By Isabella Martin “Hi everyone!  My name is Isabella Martin and I am a junior Political Science and Economics major with minors in International Business and Russian Studies at the University of Looahvulle.” My favorite part of attending conferences is interacting with students from all around the country and the world, professors that have studied a wide range of topics, and professionals that are gracious enough to educate the new generation of leaders.  I applied for the PPIA Public Service Weekend at Georgetown University conference without knowledge of how many students were able to attend, which professionals I would meet, and really what the conference was about.   My acceptance email said that I was one of thirty to be accepted to the program and I was immediately added to a “Georgetown University: PPIA Public Service Weekend” Facebook page with my fellow conference attendees.  I did not know anyone prior to the start of the conference, so I f...

FOR YOUR BOOKSHELF | Scott Straus’s  Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa  ­ (Cornell University Press, 2015)    In his Grawemeyer Award-winning book,  Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa , Scott Straus addresses a key world-order question: why do some crises escalate to genocide, while others, with similar features, do not? What pushes decision makers toward genocide in some situations, and away from it in others? Strauss defines genocide as a large-scale, selective, purposive, terminal killing of a group in society. Genocide is a deliberate act to cripple permanently and irreparably an entire social group. And yet, genocide is rare. Most wars end without genocide. Straus writes: “Genocide is hard to explain. …Genocide is deliberate…and…requires planning and perseverance.  It is costly and difficult to sustain…for long pe...