“So many things happen in Hungary, but for international students it’s hard to get information about scandals between Hungary and the European Union, for example,” says Agnes Kelemen, an editor at the student-published CEU Weekly. “It’s important to channel Hungarian news for the CEU audience.”
A student in the two-year M.A. program in nationalism studies, Kelemen realized last fall that she could play a role in providing news about Hungarian politics to the CEU student community and quickly joined the CEU Weekly, an independent newspaper run by students and alumni. She had no background in journalism, but saw a chance to get some experience.
Kelemen says that writing about the Hungarian student protests over the past few months has been the most interesting project for her, as a graduate of Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), which drew attention when it let 21 humanities professors go due to budget cuts, resulting in student protests. Her story appeared on the front page of the Feb. 28 issue. See http://issuu.com/ceuweekly/docs/weekly29.
“I wrote about the student protests in December and the headline was “Will Hungarian students keep on protesting?” Kelemen says, “and in February, I wrote about it again.” She believes that the stories generated interest because “CEU students feel solidarity with the Hungarian students.”
Kelemen spent several years in Italy as a child and returned to study in Rome for a year prior to attending CEU. In the next academic year, she plans to write her M.A. thesis about Hungarian Jewish students in the 1920s and 30s who went to Italy when the so-called “numerus clausus” law restricted entry to Hungarian universities with ethnic quotas. Italy was an unusual choice, behind Germany and Czechoslovakia as educational destinations.
Read CEU Weekly here http://ceuweekly.blogspot.hu/, access past issues here http://issuu.com/ceuweekly/docs, or find them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TheCEUWeekly.
