Student experience and achievement

Sixty-five University of Kansas School of Law students provided more than 2,500 hours of free legal services during the 2024-2025 academic year.

The University of Kansas has awarded 13 students with honors that recognize community engagement, leadership and academics. The University Awards, among the most prestigious awards presented at KU, were established to recognize students who embody service excellence, dedication or whose academic achievements are stellar.

A national civic engagement group has recognized Maddie Souser, a senior from Lansing, in the 2024 Student Voting Honor Roll, which recognizes students at participating campuses who have gone above and beyond to advance nonpartisan student voter registration, education and turnout efforts in their communities.

More than 130 undergraduate students participated in the 28th annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, which featured Jayhawks' original mentored scholarship as well as artists’ talks and creative displays from many disciplines.

Twenty students have been selected to receive the merit-based University of Kansas Madison and Lila Self Memorial Scholarship for the 2025-2026 academic year, awarded to outstanding Jayhawks who will be transitioning into their first year of a master’s or doctoral program at KU.

A pair of student employees who do vital work maintaining physical and digital collections and two KU Libraries Student Ambassadors were honored among their peers and supervisors at the annual Dean’s Award for Student Employee Excellence (DASEE) luncheon May 1 in Watson Library.

The KU-Institute of Transportation Engineers (KU-ITE) traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, in April to compete in the 2025 Missouri Valley District Institute of Transportation Engineers (MOVITE) Traffic Bowl Competition, where they took home first place.

Ten University of Kansas students received the 2025 Tradition of Excellence Award for their leadership on the Lawrence campus. The award is presented annually by the KU Alumni Association and the Student Alumni Network.

The University of Kansas Libraries honored eight student finalists and awarded cash prizes at the 67th annual Snyder Book Collecting Contest during a reception April 24 at Watson Library. Charles Johnson, a senior from Lawrence, won first place in the undergraduate division, and Nicholas Hoekstra, a doctoral student in special education from Comstock Park, Michigan, won first place in the graduate division.

Amrit Gautam, a KU graduate student in the physics doctoral program, was among just 62 doctoral students nationwide selected for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research Fellowship. Gautam spent the fellowship conducting his thesis research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.