Sometimes Muskan Verma (India, UWC Atlantic, Bates College ’21) wonders why she does so much, both on campus and off.

“In the fall semester of my sophomore year in college, two people in my life took their lives due to mental-health problems,” writes Nam Do (Vietnam, UWC-USA, Brown ’21). A computer science major, he spent much of the next winter looking through online mental-health subforums on Reddit.

With phone-charging costs alone nearly 400 times higher than in the U.S., “rural sub-Saharan Africans, most of whom live on less than $1 U.S. a day, also face some of the highest energy fees in the world,” writes Paul-Miki Akpablie.

Luther College became a Davis UWC Scholars Program partner college in 2004 and enrolled their first two scholars—from Malaysia and Bolivia—in 2005. Since that time, 192 Luther Davis UWC Scholars have graduated from Luther. And with the current group of 113 scholars on campus, their 15th year of the program marks over 300 scholars.

Emma Smith, (Duke ’16, UWC-USA) cofounder and chief operating officer of Eversend, a mobile-wallet payment system for consumers in Africa, was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 list. 

The summer before Linda Worden (Canada, Pearson UWC, Williams ’19) was to begin a junior year abroad at Oxford University, a fire took 72 lives in West London’s 24-story Grenfell Tower apartment building.

He’s been on leave this academic year from his job as Cambodia’s deputy chief of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Office at the Ministry of Commerce — but Imsouchivy “G.V.” Suos continues to be a busy man.

As the child of a Palestinian refugee family in Syria, Yamaan Attwa (Syria, UWC Dilijan, Princeton ’21) has never set foot on his ancestral land.

“Math, computation and technology will forever add substantial value in safely unlocking the world’s vast amounts of energy resources,” writes Ricardo Kabila (Angola, Waterford Kamhlaba UWC, Connecticut College ’13).

In his first year at the University of Oklahoma, Pranav Mohan ’19 (India, UWC of South East Asia) started “Money Spent Right,” a campaign promoting personal philanthropy.

Kevin Lal Shrestha (Nepal, Li Po Chun UWC, Franklin & Marshall ’16) works with his father, Prabin Shrestha, as consultants and representatives for foreign firms involved in major infrastructure projects.

Earlham College – a private liberal arts school with Quaker roots – is home to about 1,050 students in Richmond, Indiana. This year, one of its seniors, Summia Tora, will be the first Afghan to win the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the most prestigious academic awards, which funds three years of graduate studies at Oxford University. 

As a public-school student in Guadalajara, Mexico who loved math and wanted to compete in national competitions, Cuauhtemoc Cruz Herrera (UWC-USA, Macalester ’19) approached several private schools that had math clubs. 

When Wed Al-Nod (Yemen, UWC Atlantic, St. Olaf ’19) stepped up to the pulpit last October at St. Olaf College’s Boe Memorial Chapel as the featured speaker in an interfaith service, she spoke about science. 

UWC changed his life. To give others the same chance, Terence Steinberg (USA, UWC Adriatic, Macalester ’11) will soon put his life on the line in a project he’s calling the United World Challenge.

María Lis Baiocchi has won the 2019 Sylvia Forman Graduate Prize winner for her paper, “The Bargaining Power of Love: Access to Rights, Affective Capital, and the Political Economy of Feelings in Paid Domestic Work in Buenos Aires, Argentina.”

Describing himself as “a passionate philanthropist, sailor and a serial entrepreneur,” Djordje Hinic (Serbia, UWC in Mostar, University of Richmond ’13) reports...

In the autumn of her first year at Northwestern, Ieva Stakvilevičiūtė (Lithuania, Red Cross Nordic UWC, Northwestern ’20) first saw a sun-powered car built by the NUSolar student team.

Nine recent UWC alums headed to the UN headquarters in NYC to meet with UN General Assembly President, Maria Fernanda Espinosa, and about 20 other UN Ambassadors keen to hear their views about the UN and how the UN should be communicating with today’s youth.

In much of the world, the impacts of climate change are likely to further deepen political tensions over scarce water supplies, wrote Scott Moore (USA, Li Po Chun UWC, Princeton ’09) in an op-ed last year for the Washington Post.

Why shouldn’t day-old pastries help to educate low-income kids? That’s the concept behind DayOld Eats, an enterprise co-founded in London by Josephine Liang (China, Mahindra UWC, Colorado College ’16). 

Rachel Ndjuluwa, a rising junior at Wartburg College, recently was awarded a scholarship from the International Association of Black Actuaries for the upcoming school year.

Thandolwethu “Shakes” Dlamini (eSwatini, Waterford Kamhlaba UWC, Duke ’20) delayed his college graduation to work for a year in Lesotho as a mechanical engineering fellow for OnePower.

“Social justice and human dignity are undermined when basic social infrastructure is missing or absent,” writes Svitlana Orekhova (Ukraine, UWC USA, Bates ’09). 

Claremont McKenna College has a number of preprofessional student organizations — but when Mei Masuyama ’19 (Japan, UWC of South East Asia) came to campus, there were none for female students interested in business careers. 

Moni Ayoub ’19 (College of the Atlantic, UWC Adriatic) will travel the world for a year exploring the roles and stories of women and mothers, and how different societies are addressing domestic violence, following the award of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.

Before she entered UWC, Lidia Mandava (Mozambique, Waterford Kamhlaba UWC, Cornell ’20) thought she was headed for a career in science or engineering. 

As an EcoRep intern for the Dartmouth Sustainability Office, Meriem Fouad (Morocco, Red Cross Nordic UWC, Dartmouth ’21) and three fellow interns carried out a recycling campaign for food containers.

“Women own 25% of the world’s coffee farms and make up 70% of the workforce in the coffee-growing process,” writes Abhinav Khanal (Nepal, Pearson UWC, Earlham ’16). 

One good example of what excites Marta Manzin (Italy, UWC in Mostar, MIT ’19) about her work at MIT’s Little Devices Lab is the water- and blood-testing device she helped to make that’s built into a stapler.