Education Without Boundaries: Ken Knowlton

Ken Knowlton
Political Science Major / Kennebunkport, ME

During the year he spent as an exchange student after high school, Ken Knowlton began to realize what it means to be a global citizen. As a student at Goucher College, he became one.

Knowlton took a year off before college to travel to Slovakia with the Rotary Youth Exchange Program. Two years later, as a Goucher student, he returned to the country to complete an internship at the United States Embassy in Bratislava.

A political science major, Knowlton found the internship with the help of Goucher's Sarah T. Hughes Field Politics Center, which connects students with high-quality internships in politics and public policy both in the U.S. and worldwide. Knowlton's assignment was a major public-diplomacy project called SEED — Support for Eastern European Democracy.

He traveled around Slovakia with his boss, a cultural affairs officer, meeting with galleries, schools, and other organizations and people developing new ways of exploring Slovak history, literature, and culture.

"We gave out about $4.8 million in small grants," he says. "It wasn't paper-pushing at all."

Knowlton's internship coincided with some major changes in both the local and the global political scenes. When he arrived in Slovakia, the country was bidding to get into the European Union. By the time he left, they were being inducted. Meanwhile, his own country's position in the world was shifting as the war in Iraq continued to rage.

"It was an interesting time," Knowlton says. "There was a feeling of anti-Americanism that grew over the time I was there. But I would sit down and have conversations with people, one on one, and by the end of it, I found that we both usually felt a lot better about each other. That's really what I think of as diplomacy."

Knowlton followed that internship with another one in the U.S. State Department, this time at the United Nations, helping to coordinate peace operations with military staff in New York and Washington, DC. Back at Goucher, he continued to round out his education by taking courses about other areas of the world — and exploring other areas of interest within political science.

"I feel like America is in a stage right now where it really needs to improve its relationship with the world, so international politics and diplomacy is where I've concentrated my efforts," Knowlton says. "But I also don't want to concentrate on that to the exclusion of American politics, so I've tried to educate myself on those issues as well."

And he has involved himself in Goucher's community at the same time, serving as a peer facilitator for Goucher's first-year Connections courses, leading tours and hosting students as a student ambassador for the college's Admissions Office, and raising money for AIDS awareness as a performer with Red Hot Blue, a student a cappella singing group.

It's all part of Knowlton's idea of global citizenship. "It's important to go out into the world and experience it for yourself," he says. "And it's important to come back and do something with the knowledge and energy you've gained.

During the year he spent as an exchange student after high school, Ken Knowlton began to realize what it means to be a global citizen. As a student at Goucher College, he became one.

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