Mariam Aburdeineh

At first glance, Jamie Gergen and Jennifer Kasse-Wanzer have little in common. Gergen hasn’t been to a college campus in a couple of decades. Kasse-Wanzer works at one every day.
What do they share? Both are pursuing bachelor’s degrees. And neither can attend college like a traditional student.

During his freshman year, Ali Kahil told his professor he’d be late to his 3 p.m. class, but he didn’t specify the reason. When he arrived 30 minutes later, he sent the professor a link: It was Kahil speaking on CNBC just an hour earlier, giving stock recommendations.

George Mason University assistant professor Derek Horstmeyer has no problem trusting his finance students with a quarter-million dollars in the stock market. He’s been doing so since fall 2018 when the university’s first Student Managed Investment Fund began.

George Mason University has a large student body—more than 37,000 people—but that doesn’t mean it’s hard to find community. And that’s especially true for the S-CAR Ambassadors.

Students poring over textbooks in the library may be one image that comes to mind when thinking of law school, but for students in George Mason University’s Free Speech Clinic at the Antonin Scalia Law School, their experience is also highly interactive.

Smithsonian Magazine’s editorial team was busy planning their January 2019 issue on America’s involvement in armed conflicts. They wanted to assess the current military and veteran communities’ opinions of hot-topic cultural, political and sexual issues—so they reached out to George Mason University for expertise in designing the poll and analyzing its results.

Shells rained down in the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine four years ago when a war broke out between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian armies. Ukrainian scholar Ararat Osipian escaped the war zone after two months, moving to Western Ukraine and Bucharest until his city, Kramatorsk, was taken back by the Ukrainian Army.

George Mason University has been a haven for Osipian, who is the first endangered scholar the university is hosting through its membership in the New University in Exile Consortium. He’s thankful to be at Mason—remaining in Ukraine was extra risky based on his academic background, he said.