"It was like the Oscars," said Professor David Gramling, "red carpet, collective suspense, a packed auditorium,—and then, the inimitable Alexander Ganz was called up to the podium!" On Monday evening, April 9 at the Memorial Student Union East Ballroom, Transcultural German Studies doctoral student (and soon to be doctoral candidate) Ganz was the one and only person campus-wide to be named Outstanding Graduate Student Leader for 2012. "It surely goes back to all the great people I had the pleasure to work with in the past three years" Ganz added.
"Graduate student leadership is a difficult quality to measure," said Gramling, "because the experience of teaching, studying, writing, and maintaining one's personal commitments seems to exhaust all of a given Masters or Doctoral student's daily schedule. But Alex somehow finds a way to give back a stunning amount to the University, to the College of Humanities, and to the Department of German Studies. For instance, his dexterity, imagination, and professionalism have been a crucial component of the Multilingual, 2.0? symposium (April 13-15), for which Alex serves as Technical Director." Ganz has also played a truly pioneering role in the Deutscher Studenten-Club, the annual soccer tournament fundraiser for the Department, and in curricular development in the Basic Language Program and beyond. With Department Head Prof. Barbara Kosta and SLAT doctoral candidate Kacy Peckenpaugh, Ganz has been developing a blended (on-line and in-person) curriculum around Intercultural Competence in foreign language learning. The Department thanks him for his outstanding service and congratulates him on a well-earned honor.