Learning
Students attend national conference on U.S. Affairs at West Point
Three Muskingum University students attended the Student Conference on U.S. Affairs (SCUSA) hosted by the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Jason Schaumleffel, a junior political science major from Nashport, attended this year's conference. Attending from Muskingum in 2014 was Michelle Serozynski, a senior majoring in international affairs, political science and French from Westerville. Phil Hicks, a senior majoring in international affairs and political science from North Ridgeville, attended in 2015.
Titled Democracy and Democratization: Challenges and Opportunities, the four-day conference drew students from all over the United States. It featured more than a dozen roundtable discussions on topics including economic development, security and political radicalization, as well as sessions focusing on the challenges facing the major regions of the world. The keynote speaker was Dr. Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
This year’s SCUSA was the 68th held at West Point. Its purpose is to facilitate interaction and constructive discussion between civilian student delegates and West Point cadets in an effort to better understand the challenges the United States faces today.
The interaction between the civilian students and the cadets helps them develop policy recommendations that are informed by their attendance at the conference’s many sessions, which exposes them to noted authorities in various fields of domestic and international policy.
The policy recommendations created are then presented to the conference at large, and those judged the best are published in the Undergraduate Journal of Social Sciences.
SCUSA is widely regarded as a world-class conference and is considered unique because it is organized and executed exclusively by West Point cadets.
