+
inside this issue
THE UNIVERSITY SAN
PRIVATE FUNDING. Private donors now make up the majority of funding for new campus buildings News >> PAGE 2
LIFE Medical a derage dr Kansas H
▶ CONNER MITCHE @ConnerMitchell0
A bill in the Legislature would give immunity from c
THURSDAY, FEB. 4, 2016
PRIVATE FUNDING Private donors now make up the majority of funding for new campus buildings News >> PAGE 2
LIFELINE 9
Medical amnesty bill for underage drinking to be heard Kansas House
> CONNER MITCHELL
@ConnerMitchell0
A bill in the Kansas Legislature that would give minors immunity from criminal prosecution for seeking medical assistance.
dent Advisory Committee, which reports to the Kansas Board of Regents.
In an email, Student Senate Communications Director Isaac Bahney said Pringle and other student body presidents would push for legislative support of
CAROLINE FIGC/U
I thought studying abroad in Holzkirchen, Germany, would be an excellent way for me to improve my German. Six weeks of constant opportunities to practice-great, not too long-I would be in and out in no time with nine credit hours under my belt, along with an improved knowledge of the German language and culture. And in a sense, I was right. I did refine my German -- I picked up useful idiomatic phrases, corrected a few ungrammatical habits, and, overall, gained an ease and fluidity with the language I would have been hard-pressed to obtain otherwise. I learned many things about German culture and history, too-- through excursions, reading assignments, and living and breathing the German lifestyle 24/7, my understanding of the culture expanded as much as my understanding of the language. But this barely summarizes how I enriched myself by choosing to study abroad. Those seemingly short six weeks left a deep and permanent impression on my character in a way I would have never foreseen, precipitating my learning and growth in ways vastly transcending the confines of any classroom.
Spending any appreciable length of time in a foreign culture is wonderfully disorienting. It snaps the ego-inflated mind back into the reality of its small place in the grand scheme of things. It may hit you hard or hardly at all, but it will hit you.
Whether you break down in a train station in Munich because you can't, in your jet-lagged state, figure out the tangled mess of a map and array of letters and numbers meant to be a schedule, or whether you just stop dead in your tracks for a split second in the Alexanderplatz (as I did) as the masses hustle and bustle about you, as your friends crack jokes and show off their bargain purchases, because you're caught off guard by the subtlest, most ineffable feeling rumbling quietly in your gut that is your realization of how tiny you really are; how alone, though you're in the most populous city in all of Germany. You can lose yourself in more than one way when the bonds of years upon years of habit in your mind are smashed apart by the shock of being transplanted into another culture, when you find yourself, at times, in almost what seems to be another world, whose rules, both spoken and unspoken, you are still laboring to internalize, struggling with things you had so taken for granted at home, things like a fine-tuned control over the very way you project yourself to other humans in your speech and mannerisms.
Studying abroad isn't meant for those seeking comfort. It is meant for those who dare to confront the boundaries of their comfort and prod at them until they explain themselves. Studying abroad tests you; it puts you in situations where you will learn what you are really made of at
heart, situations in which you will be forced to cope, learn, grow, and better yourself, whether this be in minute ways or in fundamental ones. You may find trouble in the confused frown of a shopkeeper to whom you offered a far too literally translated "Have a good day!"; you may find it in Salzburg, Austria, where you miss the last train of the night back to Germany; you may find it in your host parents' awkward dinnertime political conversations chock-full of high-level vocabulary; you may even find it in a fellow study-abroad student
-- falling in love abroad is a known hazard, after all.
As it turns out, the things you might have once felt so lost about aren't that important after all. Indeed, people are more alike than they often make themselves out to be, regardless of which hands they may use to hold their silverware, regardless of the carbonation level of their drinking water, regardless of how they feel about resting their feet on furniture. You lose yourself, and then you find yourself. Regardless of where the trying moments may lie, if you allow it, somehow, somewhere, amidst all the twists and turns of the paths of your experience, you will find yourself, too.
Frank Kim, Summer in Holzkirchen,
Germany
sports
SENATE Student Senate Rights Committee appoints new senator to sit on the Fee Review Committee >> Kansan.com/news
ENGAGE WITH US
@KANSANNEWS
/THEKANSAN
KANSAN.NEWS
@UNIVERSITY
DAILYKANSAN
A recent gents adm in the 2014 revealed tha other Regen the Univers had the secber of studer did not mee admittance Accordin presented i Jan. 20 me percent or the Univers two percent state stude the 2014-1 were admit meet the dards for a "KU haed minime exceptions rector of Pinamont normally percent o