Exploring the Higher Ideas Through Politics and Mathematics
A Spotlight on Sarah Onken, ’16
Written by Madeleine Jepsen
Sarah Onken, ’16, is a George Washington fellow majoring in mathematics and politics.
Until the summer before her senior year of high school, Onken had never heard of Hillsdale. Four months later, Hillsdale was the only college she applied to.
She first heard of Hillsdale College through a Constitution seminar offered near her hometown of Seymour, Indiana. Her father asked her to go to the seminar, which was offered by former house representative John Hostettler. The series sparked her interest in the foundations of the U.S. government.
“While I was there, I realized how fascinated I was with this talk of the Constitution, our nation’s history, and the ideas behind the founding document—not just the structure of government, but why they thought the government should be structured that way,” she said.
At the end of the six-session series, she approached Mr. Hostettler.
“I asked the congressman where I should go to school, and he said, ‘Hillsdale.’”
Now Onken studies the same subject that led her to Hillsdale. She also studies mathematics, a longtime interest of hers.
“Math was because I loved it, and politics was because it fascinated me,” she said.
Although she came to love these fields through different paths, her time at Hillsdale has allowed her to have a greater appreciation for the interconnectedness of what most people see as disparate fields.
“One of the best parts of being a math major is tapping into these higher ideas about the way in which our world works, and also these higher ideas in logic and in thinking,” she explained. “Once you’re able to explore those ideas and learn about them more, you see how they pervade other aspects of what you’re studying on campus. So when I’m studying politics, the mathematical knowledge that I have—the rigor and logic necessary for making arguments in mathematics—carries over into politics when I’m analyzing the arguments that someone has written, or when I’m making my own arguments writing a paper.”
Onken described office hours as incredibly helpful and enlightening, even beyond the course material. One time, she went in to ask one of the math professors a five-minute question on a homework problem and ended up staying much longer to discuss her thesis.
“I asked just one question about my math thesis to get his opinion on something I had been thinking about regarding the philosophy of math. Next thing I know, he’s pulling down so many books from his bookshelf and showing me exact passages of things,” she said. “What started as a five-minute office hour turned into a fifty-minute discussion.”
A self-professed “office hours hog,” Onken said this is not an atypical experience to have with professors at Hillsdale.
“That experience is just one that indicates how a lot of my time with professors has been,” she said. “You go in and, sure, there are going to be questions on the material, but all of the professors can talk to you about so much more. They care about ideas across disciplines and about life in general.”
In the spring of 2015, Onken participated in WHIP, the Washington-Hillsdale Internship Program. She interned for the Heritage Foundation’s center for principles in politics and included her semester there as one of the many highlights of her collegiate years.
“It was a perfect fit, because a lot of my daily work was exactly what I do when I study. It was seeing how principles and ideas influence policies,” she said. “We were really looking into American political thought, both modern liberalism and conservatism and libertarianism and the branches thereof, and seeing where they inform one another, where they get their ideas from, and how that shapes their policies.”
While there, she also took two classes in the evenings: constitutional history and nineteenth-century American literature. Though the workload was intense, Onken found it extremely gratifying.
“It was definitely busy, trying to balance a full-time job with two classes,” she said. “I’m not going to lie that it was at times stressful, but it was fun because we were in our small little community. You get really close to the people that you’re out there with, and that was really nice. I made friendships that semester that I hadn’t before. I can’t really imagine not being friends with these people. And D.C. is such a cool area. To be able to say, ‘Yeah, I went to the Capitol Building today to put on a seminar for congressional staffers,’ is kind of surreal.”
About a week after studying the battle of Antietam in constitutional history, she toured the site, bringing alive the concepts and events they had discussed.
“You’re there, and you’re looking at everything, and when you can actually walk in the very place, where if union troops had advanced just so many more yards, the entire Civil War would have ended in 1862 before anything huge had happened, and it’s incredible,” she said. “It solidifies everything that you’ve learned and helps you appreciate it in a way that you hadn’t in abstraction.”
Madeleine Jepsen, ‘18, studies biochemistry and journalism. Outside the classroom, Madeleine serves as a reporter and assistant editor for the Collegian. She is also involved in Catholic Society.