Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Tourist guides often describe Lawrence as a mid-sized city with a small-town feel.
Yet, to many students at the University of Kansas, small town doesn’t equate to a town of 82,000 with a Wal-Mart, SuperTarget, nearly every major fast food chain restaurant and more than 20 bars.
Where senior Jennifer Meitl comes from, small town means something entirely different.
“We have a Quick Stop, a post office, a telephone company,” Meitl said of Rush Center, her 176-person hometown in west-central Kansas. “That’s really all there is to it. There’s a little bar and grill on the corner. A stop sign. No stoplight.”
Wendy Rohleder-Sook, assistant director of the Freshman-Sophomore Advising Center, estimated that more than 26 percent of in-state students come from outside the state’s most populated areas: Topeka, Wichita, Lawrence and the Kansas City area.
That equates to more than 1,500 students, each year, pouring in from small towns and rural areas. They come from unique places, such as Cawker City in north central Kansas, which is home to the world’s largest ball of twine, and La Crosse in the west-central part of the state, which is the self-proclaimed barbed-wire capital of the world.
Photo by Taylor MillerKANSAN
KANSAN
Abby Hughes, St. Louis junior and member of the Kansan Advertising staff talks with Bethany Beilman, Hays junior, outiside of Mallott Hall yesterday. Beilman serves as the Vice President and Events Co-chair for Kansas Connections, an organization that helps small-town KU students meet new people at the University.
For these students, arriving to the University can be somewhat of a culture shock. That’s why a group of students has formed Kansas Connections, an organization aimed at helping small-town students adjust to campus life.
Nathan Ladd, the group’s president, came to the University two years ago from a farm outside Effingham, a town of 586 people 40 miles north of Lawrence.
He said he knew what it was like to come to the University and suddenly be submerged in a sea of unknown faces. He said he quickly learned to get involved with on-campus groups and enjoy the diversity of his new environment.
“I definitely hadn’t had a lot of opportunities,” he said. “That’s the great thing about KU. You meet people from all over the state, all over the country, all over the world.”
Kansas Connections was started in February when Ladd and a few other students with small-town Kansas roots met with Rohleder-Sook and Erin Michaelis, assistant director of the Student Involvement and Leadership Center, to discuss the problems small-town students face when they first come to the University.
The group gained momentum and accumulated more than 40 members by the end of the spring, Ladd said.
Meitl, the group’s campus awareness chairwoman, said she was working to make the group a major presence on campus by working with other organizations, such as the Alumni Association and Peer Educators.
Meitl’s younger sister, Rhonda, a freshman, is now going down the same path of adjustment that her big sister went down three years ago. The younger Meitl said she was amazed by her first class, in Budig Hall, where she sat among hundreds of students. Her high school class consisted of 26 people.
She was one of about 30 students who attended Kansas Connections’ first meeting of the semester Aug. 15. She’s already involved with the club, as she’s helped with its Web site and plans to attend an upcoming barbecue at Clinton Lake.
“It’s been nice because I can recognize people and say ‘hi,’” she said. “We can relate to a small-town background, the quirky things we do.”
Brianne McDaniel, a freshman from Scott City, a western Kansas town of 3,545, is also trying to adjust to her second week of college life. Her challenges are the same every student faces, such as being away from parents, living with less guidance, and staying organized.
She also said she discovered that a campus of more than 25,000 people, in the middle of a mid-sized city, can be a lonely place when you’ve been surrounded by familiar faces your entire life. She said she was grateful for the friends she’d already made through Kansas Connections.
“It made a big place seem smaller to me,” she said.
— Edited by Kellis Robinett
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