Meet Our NSR Student Editors — Kendra Johnson, Social Media Editor – The North Star Reports – Sponsored by The College of St. Scholastica and The Middle Ground Journal

Meet Our NSR Student Editors — Kendra Johnson, Social Media Editor – The North Star Reports – Sponsored by The College of St. Scholastica and The Middle Ground Journal

Kendra Johnson, NSR Social Media Editor. My intended major is nursing. I just currently completed my first semester in the program and my expected graduation is May of 2017. This is my first year working with the North Star Reports.

I was raised and grew up in Prior Lake, MN from when I was born until my freshman year of college. My parents decided to move closer to relatives in November of my freshman year so we packed up and hiked further down south to Elko New Market, MN. It’s only about 20 minutes south of Prior Lake but it sure does feel a lot longer because the two cities are just so vastly different. While I was in high school I worked at a daycare and that’s primarily what helped influence my decision to become a nurse. I fell in love with the idea that I can make someone else’s day better just by showing them how much they are cared for and matter to others. In my dream world I would like to work at the University of Minnesota Children’s Hospital but typically the patients I would see here would be ones that are very ill and need the most help, love, and care. They’d see me on their worst of days and I would like to have the opportunity to make a difference in their life. When people look back at whatever hard or troubling time they were going through while in my care, what I want them to remember most is how much of a positive impact I was on their life. I want to make a difference in someone’s life other than my own, and to me, that’s what life is all about. Working in daycare also inspired me to become a pediatric nurse. I don’t know what it is about children but they seem to have this wonderful gift of brightening even the darkest of days. I’ve gone back and forth between that and doing OB so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what direction life takes me!

I am volunteering for the North Star Reports because I think it adds so much more to my learning and education that even I can’t learn in the classroom. I am able to browse the internet and look for the most interesting news articles I can find and have the opportunity to share with my fellow classmates. I am forced to apply what I have learned and what I know/understand about the world and connect it back to me in my tiny little hometown. I feel a much greater sense of connectedness to people from all around the world and also to places I’ve never even heard of before. I hope I am able to help others learn what I have learned so far from doing this as well. We are a very small puzzle piece to the world but without all the pieces, we wouldn’t have a world to begin with. We all matter and are connected in some small way or another but sometimes it just takes a little digging to see that.
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Please contact Professor Liang if you wish to write for The North Star Reports — HLIANG (at) css.edu

See also, our Facebook page with curated news articles at http://www.facebook.com/NorthStarReports
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The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, The College of St. Scholastica and the scholarly Middle Ground Journal’s online learning community and outreach program with undergraduate and K-12 classes around the world. The North Star Reports has flourished since 2012. For a brief summary, please see the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History, at:

http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2013/1305/Opening-The-Middle-Ground-Journal.cfm

The North Star Reports publishes edited essays from our students, particularly from those who are currently stationed, or will soon be stationed abroad. Students have reported from Mongolia, Southern China, Shanghai, northeastern China, The Netherlands, Tanzania, Ireland, England, Finland, Russia, and Haiti. We also have students developing reviews of books, documentaries, and films, and analysis of current events from around the world. We will post their dispatches, and report on their interactions with the North Star Reports students and teachers. We thank The Department of History and Politics and the School of Arts and Letters of The College of St. Scholastica for their generous financial support for The North Star Reports and The Middle Ground Journal.

Hong-Ming Liang, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief, The North Star Reports; Chief Editor, The Middle Ground Journal; Associate Professor of History and Politics, The College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, MN, USA

(c) 2012-present The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy http://NorthStarReports.org ISSN: 2377-908X The NSR is sponsored by The Middle Ground Journal and The College of St. Scholastica. See Masthead for our not-for-profit educational open- access policy. K-12 teachers, if you are using these reports for your classes, please contact editor-in-chief Professor Liang at HLIANG (at) css.edu