Syd­ney Kahan
BY LAUREN MIGNOGNO ’07

WHEN IT was time to find a col­lege, Syd­ney Kahan knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted to move out of the cold north and away from home. She also wanted to keep play­ing soc­cer, study to become a nurse, and con­tinue to travel. She found all of those oppor­tu­ni­ties at Wes­ley College.

Kahan and her fam­ily are Reform Jews. When Kahan was a junior in high school, she par­tic­i­pated in March of the Liv­ing, a trip to Poland and Israel for Jew­ish teens. She spent two weeks away from home with­out a cell phone or a lap­top. This was her first time out of the coun­try. Dur­ing the week in Poland, Kahan joined 11,000 Jew­ish youths from all over the world as they marched in silence from Auschwitz to Birke­nau on Yon Hashoah — Holo­caust Remem­brance Day. This was the same route Jews were forced to march to the gas cham­bers, the route known as the March of Death. She and the other teens then toured the con­cen­tra­tion camp at Birkenau.

Vis­it­ing such an impor­tant piece of Jew­ish his­tory was not easy for Kahan.“Poland was the hard­est thing I have ever gone through. I had trou­ble sleep­ing some nights.” Israel, on the other hand, was a com­pletely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. The youth who par­tic­i­pated in March of the Liv­ing spent a week in Israel where they cel­e­brated Israel’s Inde­pen­dence Day, Yom Ha’atzmaut. “On this day, you pretty much party in the streets of Israel. It’s crazy,” she said. The crowd in the streets was a mix­ture of Ortho­dox, Con­ser­v­a­tive and Reform Jews, all com­ing together to cel­e­brate and sing songs they all knew.

After the cel­e­bra­tion, Kahan marched from the old city of Jerusalem to the Wail­ing Wall. She felt a strong con­nec­tion with her reli­gion while she was there. “My whole Jew­ish iden­tity I feel like I’ve got­ten in touch with, espe­cially in Israel.” She hopes to return again one day, pos­si­bly in a study abroad pro­gram. Kahan chose Wes­ley Col­lege because it fit her search for a school south of her home­town, Cranston, Rhode Island, that had a com­pet­i­tive Divi­sion III women’s soc­cer team and a strong nurs­ing pro­gram. She found all of that at Wes­ley, and after spend­ing a night with “the soc­cer girls,” Kahan knew
Wes­ley was the place for her. She already loves the school after
spend­ing the first half of the fall semes­ter tak­ing a full class load and play­ing goal keeper on the Wolver­ines women’s soc­cer team. “So far,” she said, “soc­cer has been amaz­ing. It is a huge rea­son why I like the school so much. It gets you involved so quickly.” Jug­gling sports and aca­d­e­mics is not easy, though, espe­cially since the nurs­ing pro­gram is intense, so her goal is to main­tain the bal­ance between the two while she is at Wes­ley. Kahan is con­sid­er­ing mov­ing on to a master’s in nurs­ing after she grad­u­ates and hopes to be a pedi­atric oncol­ogy nurse. Her best friend was diag­nosed with leukemia at the age of 11 and Kahan has been inter­ested in help­ing sick chil­dren ever since her first expo­sure to that world. When she was a sopho­more in high school, she attended the National Youth Lead­er­ship Forum (NYLF) on Med­i­cine, a ten day expe­ri­ence for high school stu­dents who want to explore med­ical pro­fes­sions. She stayed on Emory University’s cam­pus in Geor­gia and attended lec­tures by top doc­tors and sur­geons. She also toured a hos­pi­tal, watched a birth, and even helped skin a cadaver. She learned about pos­si­ble options in the field of med­i­cine and made some good friends in the process.

Kahan was for­tu­nate to have taken part in the NYLF trip as well as March of the Liv­ing, both eye-opening expe­ri­ences for a teenager.
As the trip to Geor­gia was also her first extended time away from home, it helped solid­ify her later deci­sion to move away for col­lege. Now com­pletely con­tent in her pur­suits at Wes­ley, she hasn’t regret­ted her deci­sion one bit and she looks­for­ward to the many oppor­tu­ni­ties still to come in her col­lege career.