Congratulations to Susanne Gabrielsen, UWC Red Cross Nordic alumna(Norway NC), for being awarded her doctorate by the University of Minnesota following the submission of her theses: ‘Longitudinal Intergroup Contact Model Comparison at the Multicultural High School UWC RCN’. Susanne concluded her thesis with the following statement:

RCN puts young men and women who might otherwise never meet in contact, knowing that conflict will arise, and guides its students through them. The college becomes a steady presence during the students’ last two adolescent years, fraught with emotion, growth, and crystallization of values. At RCN, students get a taste of the conflicts and war that ravage the world, but RCN also provides a glimpse of peace to students who have never before experienced it. The students who leave RCN will likely never unlearn how to navigate intergroup contact, and if they are anything like the students surveyed and interviewed here, they will go into the world hoping to use what they learned from their UWC experience to create peace and a sustainable future.

Susanne wrote to say how grateful she is for the access to RCN students, and professional and personal support that she received. As she says, ‘I hope I have in some small way given back to the school to which I owe so much’.

What would students do without Mom`s heart-warming soup or Grandma’s home remedies? The Green Thumbs EAC winter term project answers these questions for the RCN community.

The Green Thumbs is an environmental EAC that approaches sustainability from a practical angle and gives an insight into what makes a sustainable and healthy lifestyle for students. In the dark winter season when students can’t take part in activities such as gardening, mushrooming, fishing or exploring edible plants around the campus, the EAC members decided to create an online space where they can share their healthy recipes, nutrition tips and home remedies that could be useful and interesting for RCN residents – and anyone else who might read the articles!

The blog will be updated weekly and will give simple, sustainable, affordable solutions for some of the challenges of student life – issues like flu-bugs, tiredness, stress or just the simple need for some home-made treats.

The blog is available here.