This summer, in-coming senior Marina Co attended one of the sessions at the Yale Young Global Scholars or YYGS program. The two week program, hosted by Yale University faculty, brought over 600 students from 150 different countries together to live and learn on the Yale University’s campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Yale was founded in 1701 and is the third oldest university in the country. According to Co, the program had over 13,000 total applicants.
The program website, globalscholars.yale.edu, describes the general vision and mission of the program as: “an unparalleled academic and leadership program at Yale University, founded on the tenets of liberal arts, renowned for its diverse and inclusive community, and committed to increasing education access.”
Co was enrolled in the Literature, Philosophy and Culture component of the session. Other components offered included Science and Technology, Politics, Law and Economics and Solving Global Challenges. Her session was described to “analyze culturally significant works, question ideas and explore creative ways to use the arts to better understand and impact communities.”
Co noted that right before leaving for the program, YYGS shared a world map with pins showing where attendees lived. The map was covered in pins, from countries as close as Canada and as far away as South Africa. Co was the only one from Alaska and “wondered if someone like me- a lifelong Alaskan and Homer resident would have anything in common with the other youth scholars,” she said in a note.
In an interview with KBBI, Co discussed additional international components of the event, “definitely my favorite part of the whole program was meeting everyone. People came from 150 different countries. So some of my closest friends and roommates were from China and Russia and Mongolia, all different places around the world. I started an ongoing list of different people from different countries that I'd met. And by the end of the summer program, I had at least 30 or 40 different countries on my list, which was really incredible,” she said.
In an earlier shared document, Co noted that YYGS brought people together from completely different places and perspectives, and it created a community where we were able to collaborate and share our stories about topics that we were all equally and unequivocally passionate about. “In the classrooms, Russian and Ukrainian students alike discussed political philosophy and what being a good leader meant. During seminars, Buddhists and Muslims collaborated to create projects showcasing what themes like belief and community truly meant. During free time, we explored the campus, traded stories, and exchanged Chinese card games for Russian ones. Over meals, we showed each other our favorite foods and explained what life at home was like,” she wrote.
Co, shared the general structure of the program. Each day started with a lecture provided by a Yale professor to approximately 150 students. Later in the day, the students were separated into smaller seminar groups of 10 to discuss the features of the lecture. Co’s two favorite courses were "Anti-racism and the Literary Arts” and “Political Power Medieval to Modern: Who should lead the United States?” Co described details of the second class in our interview, “we read Plato's Republic and the constitution of Athens parts of it, and worked our way through the ages to the Federalist Papers and all these different political philosophy works. And it was really fascinating to talk about and to kind of examine it from, I think, a different view, because the political classes that I've taken are all I don't know you always look at it through the lens of what's going on right now in the world, or kind of how the system works, but it was interesting to talk about what we thought the system should be, or the different philosophies behind different regimes and things like that. And especially in a class with people from all over the world, with different countries, and they all have different government systems. It was really interesting to hear everybody's perspectives.”
The final feature Co wanted to share is the abundance of funding assistance for programs like these for other students who might be intimidated to apply, she provided the example of how she received funding,“I was able to attend Yale Young Global Scholars through a scholarship that I was awarded through the stars Scholarship, which is the small town and rural students network, which is for students from rural or urban areas to give them the opportunities to attend programs like this and to give them the resources to study what they love or go into higher education. And I think that a lot of people don't realize how many resources and opportunities there are for students here, because you kind of feel removed living in Homer.”
