Happy Fraternity Friday and finals season to all at UMaine! For the last Fraternity Friday of the fall semester, I talked to Lukas Lagasse of Sigma Phi Epsilon. He is a political science major with a double minor in legal studies and anthropology from New Sweden, ME. Lukas transferred to UMaine two years ago in from the University of Maine at Presque Isle and spent last spring in Sweden studying modern Swedish immigration, specifically the Cougar Grant.
During Lukas’ time in Sweden, he worked helping families, mainly tourists, learn about their genealogy. He often looked through records based on the families’ last names and could help them find the places where their ancestors once lived. Lukas also learned a lot about Swedish immigration while he was abroad. Sweden is a small country, but it is densely populated. They have let in a large number of Syrian refugees in the past 10 years, with their immigrant population growing from nine million to 11 million just over the past decade.
While abroad, Lukas also earned credit for a partial Master’s thesis for his work helping a family in his home town of New Sweden, ME find their ancestors in Sweden. This family learned that from their small town, they made a large ripple of change that extended all the way back to their country.
In his fraternity, Lukas acts as the House Manager for Sig Ep. He says that in his time in Greek life, he has made stronger bonds with the kinds of people most like him and has found best friends – ones that “will be in [his] wedding someday”. He was previously in charge of the Balanced Man Scholarship, an opportunity for which is put out to every incoming male freshman with a high school GPA of 3.2 or higher. He was also on the Board of Trustees at UMaine during the 2018-2019 school year as the undergraduate representative. In this role, he brought issues to the University directly that were outside of or larger than the scope of what Student Government could address or fix. He has also been involved in Alternative Breaks as a site leader in 2018, where he planned the trips, collected and organized finances, and arranged transportation and housing for the group.
After college, Lukas hopes to go back to Sweden and work for a few years, hopefully to become a professor at a university and teach Swedish politics if a University would have a space for him to teach about it. His other plans include potentially working at the national branch of his fraternity and continuing to make contributions to a meaningful organization in his life.
Thank you Lukas for your contributions to the community and to your fraternity!