Patrick Kane is an IDP student here at Trinity, about to start the fifth of his six years here at trinity. I recently talked with Mr. Kane about his life and his experiences as a history major here at Trinity College. Mr. Kane, a retired print advertiser, came to Trinity College when he was retired to fuel his life-long love of learning. I learned that he has been interested in history his whole life, and something of a family tradition. Both his sister and his brother are history majors, and his father, who was a physician, loves history as well. This love of history, as Mr. Kane tells me, was and still is a shared experience between him and his family. Mr. Kane goes on to explain that one of the reasons the study of history is important to him is that he wants to make sure that the past is preserved.. He showed me this quote from the book, “The Fiery Trial” by Eric Foner, which read, “History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past.” Through his study of history here at Trinity, he has learned that much of what he has learned about the past is wrong, that the popular conceptions of history and historical events are sometimes misconceptions. And though Mr. Kane doesn’t precisely know what he is going to do when he is done with Trinity, he does know that he wants to give back at least some of what he has learned to the world, perhaps through teaching.

Mr. Kane has a wide and eclectic love of history, taking classes from areas of history from all places and time periods, such as the American Civil War, early Islamic history, and Jewish Studies. However, his major interest is in United States history. Mr. Kane is most interested in United States history because as a citizen of the United States of America, he wants to know the story of where he and his family came from. Mr. Kane’s ancestors where Irish and German immigrants and he is interested in American History as a setting to begin to understand his family and others came to America as a new frontier. Mr. Kane believes that the understanding of the pursuit of new frontiers of the past are still relevant to the new societal frontiers that modern society faces today, and that the mistakes and triumphs of the past can help us in the present deal with these new frontiers.

Mr. Kane came to Trinity because the college gave an older student a chance to return and finish his studies. While trying to apply to other colleges, he found that the programs offered by other similar schools aren’t as open, offering only a few spots to IDP students. Trinity, by contrast, has around 80-100 IDP students. After going through an application process involving a test and interviews with Trinity professors, Mr. Kane was accepted s one of the first IDP students accepted for 2010. He came to Trinity because it was one of the few colleges that supported both his passion for learning and his desire to return to school.