Phuket News article dated October 13, 2017 by Mark Knowles

The UWC Atlantic College seems set in a dreamscape. The boarding school for students in their late teens from around the world is situated in a Norman castle, briefly owned by William Randolph Hearst, on the Welsh coast of Glamorgan.

Ringling College of Art + Design students Elio Alonso Vasquez Miranda '17 (UWC Red Cross Nordic) and Andres Broennimann '18 (UWC Costa Rica) created a video highlighting the relevance of the Davis UWC Scholars Program. Traveling to several countries interviewing UWC graduates, their goal was to highlight the world about the exceptionality of the scholars and the worldwide UWC schools.

Gauri Mirashi (India, Mahindra UWC, Whitman ’11) runs Civic Response Team, a start-up consulting firm in Aurangabad, her hometown in India, that works with government bodies to improve municipal systems for solid-waste management.

In her first year at Yale, Yijiao He ’18 (China, UWC Atlantic) took on too much and almost burned out. By year’s end, she writes, “I had stopped half of my extracurricular activities, and started to question what I was doing at Yale.”

Fiorella Oremeño earned a first-rate education at UWC and Macalester College and she’s back in Peru, working on public policy with special interests in curbing violence against women and creating new opportunities for young people.

In 2016, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago gave one of its Peanut Butter & Jelly Awards for “students who exemplify the characteristics of an artist and a leader” to Hyein (Haley) Jung ’17 (South Korea, UWC of South East Asia). The school said Haley “has become an advocate for global perspectives on campus and in Chicago.”

The son of two medical doctors in northwestern Turkey, Murat Bilgel (Turkey, UWC-USA, Johns Hopkins ’11) earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins, and is now a research fellow at the National Institute on Aging in Washington, D.C.

After she graduated from Yale in 2013, Fatymatou Dia (Senegal, UWC-USA) joined the Casablanca office of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where she worked on projects for a diversity of industries — and discovered what she calls “my true passion.”

At Harvard, Majahonkhe and three fellow students had an idea. Couldn’t a simple system based in text messaging help patients keep up with their meds? The three designed a project, entered it in Harvard’s Innovation Challenge, and won the $5,000 Senior Social Start-up Prize.

Last August, the University of Oklahoma named Lamis Adel Mohammed Sayed Ahmed ’18 (Egypt, Red Cross Nordic UWC) one of the “20 Sooner Women Who Empower and Inspire.”

The last time Farah AlHaddad (UWC-USA, Macalester ’17) was permitted to travel home to Syria was in 2012, between her two years at UWC. 

Back when Matthew Rugamba (Botswana, Waterford Kamhlaba UWC, Lewis & Clark ’13) was an international affairs major at Lewis & Clark, his advisor urged him to do what he wanted to do — which was to work in African-themed fashion and design.

Minzhe “Yuan” Chen Cheng (Spain, Li Po Chun UWC, Ringling ’14) worked for two years as a user experience (UX) and interaction designer at Google.

For Sisa, the chance to go to UWC and then college “didn’t only change my life — it changed the life of my family. And I think that’s a beautiful thing.”

She didn’t plan to make a movie. But after Zara Currimjee (Mauritius, UWC Mahindra, Williams ’13) had returned for holidays to the island nation where she grew up snorkeling, fishing, and diving in what she calls “the most beautiful of backyards,” she decided someone should tell the world what was happening to its coral-reef waters.

Nadav Lidor will pursue a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Oxford on the two-to-three-year scholarship.

Some 25,000 student teams from over 150 nations competed last year for the $1 million Hult Prize, which promotes business entrepreneurship for social good.

Since last August, Yaro Zabavskiy has been teaching visual arts at the United World College Dilijan in Armenia, with a special focus on ceramics and analog photography. Yaro coteaches

“Since I was a kid, I had the idea that I wanted to choose a career that influenced the world in a positive way — to do something that helped others, that brought value to the world,” says Andra Pascu.

Maho Fujita (Japan, Mahindra UWC, Bucknell ’17), center, interviewed a variety of Tanzanians during her research last summer on the impacts of Chinese investment on the country.

Last summer, Bantu Mabaso carried out a Davis Project for Peace that built a learning center for new farming practices in Phalala, an isolated Lowveld community that has long depended on rainfall for its maize crops.

Growing up in a Brazilian family that had many international friends, João Cipolla Baltazar has been interested since elementary school in other cultures — and by the time of his Amherst graduation, he spoke five languages.

Soon after Justin Wong (Malaysia, UWC of South East Asia) graduated from Bowdoin in 2013, he began working in China for SOSV, a $300 million international venture-capital fund that invests in more than 150 early-stage start-ups per year.

Current Middlebury College Davis UWC scholars, alumni, and faculty from partner institutions gathered to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the world's largest international scholarship program. 

Growing up in Kenya, James Meyo (Kenya, Mahindra UWC, Bates ’14) saw a lot of sickness from infectious disease.

For Kumba Seddu, the deadly 2014-15 Ebola crisis in her homeland may have pointed her toward a pathway for making a difference.

A biology major and premed student, Nathanael works as a residential advisor to younger students and is a leader in the campus Christian Fellowship.