Student Stories

The U.S. Constitution may seem like a dusty, dry document with no relevance to people’s lives today. Now, members of the UNC Charlotte community have a chance to regain the knowledge that was lost after that test – and to gain a better understanding of the Constitution’s impact on our lives, at the University’s annual Constitution Day event.

For the first time, UNC Charlotte this fall will be a campus hub for the highly prestigious Millennium Fellowship program, with 20 undergraduates from across the university chosen as Millennium Fellows to implement their LIFE Skills Initiative. The university is one of just 69 – or 6% – named this year from over 1,200 applicant campuses from 135 nations and is the only one selected in North Carolina.

Growing up in the tiny mountain town of Hayesville, N.C., the community library became Misty Morin’s refuge, and books became her window to the wider world. In September, Morin will travel to Spain, where she will share her love of language through a Fulbright English Teaching
Assistantship, teaching English to students in La Rioja in the city
of Logroño.

For the first time ever, UNC Charlotte’s speech team has placed in the top 20 in a national speech tournament, competing against over 150 teams from across the nation in the National Forensic Association’s championship tournament held in Santa Ana, California.

Yesika Sorto Andino, a junior political science and sociology major from Charlotte, is among the 262 students selected for Campus Compact’s 2019-20 cohort of Newman Civic Fellows.

A team of UNC Charlotte graduate students is headed to Washington, D.C. to tackle the real-world problem of global migration, through an innovative national simulation competition called “The Refugee Simulation.” This year’s competition will focus on the issue of forced migration and refugees. The UNC Charlotte team and other teams will be asked to balance their budgets and their humanity, facing the underlying question of what sacrifices they are willing to make.

With resources provided through the Levine Scholars Program and the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences, student Danielle Miller has led an effort to create a weather studio in the McEniry Building for meteorology students to use to hone their skills. “I knew we needed a space to have higher quality equipment, to get more real life experience and help our students be better prepared,” she says.

A photo of a rusted shovel with a broken handle, aged by years of harsh Appalachian weather and hard work, sat on display in UNC Charlotte’s Atkins Library during most of November. Seth Flynn, the creator, is a senior who is minoring in gerontology; he submitted it as part of a contest hosted by the Gerontology Program, with the support of the Gerontology Club and the J. Murrey Atkins Library, which asked students to answer the question: “How do you see aging?” The work and the touching story behind it earned Flynn first place in the competition.

From planting American flags at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, to performing ‘Amazing Grace’ at the Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial, members of the Pride of Niner Nation are representing UNC Charlotte and the United States at the 74th commemoration of D-Day. Over 40 of the student musicians are majors or double-majors in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

This summer, dozens of College of Liberal Arts & Sciences undergraduate students from varied majors and disciplines will gain experience in research through UNC Charlotte initiatives that emphasize learn-by-doing models. They also will benefit from professional development opportunities, mentoring and interactions with each other.