Cultures, Connections & Change: My YYGS experience

For the past two weeks, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Yale Young Global Scholars program (YYGS). This is a two-week summer experience at Yale University for high school students who are interested in a challenging academic experience with a global perspective. It offers a chance to live on campus, take college-level innovative classes, and connect with other high-achieving students from around the world. Attending this program was amazing, to say the least!

The diverse network

Right off the bat, the people make the program! I didn’t expect to meet such kind and equally driven people. Whether we had similar interests and backgrounds or were completely different, it was as easy as could be to relate with everyone around me. It was even more interesting to learn about all the various cultures and ways of life. Opening up conversations was such a beautiful experience that allowed me to make connections that I’ll be keeping to this day.

Seminars

While at YYGS, I got the chance to attend 4 seminars, 2 of which occurred in two parts and the other 2 in one part. My first two-part seminar covered the ethics and mechanisms of gene editing and was taught to us by a PhD Yale student. This seminar opened me up to extensive discussions on the impact of our genetical makeup on aspects such as our emotions and how we can regulate research around genetics to ensure it remains ethically right.

The second two-part seminar I attended, also taught by a PhD Yale student, was centered around understanding neural networks and their connection to the human brain. Being a new field for me, it was a great learning experience that pushed me to think beyond my understanding. From basic information such as sections of the brain to more in-depth knowledge like using machine learning to study aging in schizophrenia, I gained a lot.

The final two seminars I had were both taught by an undergraduate Minerva student and covered how we can use algorithms to maximize efficiency and how we can adapt design thinking to our daily lives. It’s very easy to want to change the world but there are different habits and mental models that need to come into play to achieve that and those are what we covered. Concepts such as brute force and time complexity were very interesting to go through.

Family time

A family is a group of about 10 students at YYGS with one or two instructors who are the family leads (or as we called ours, ‘mum’ and ‘dad’).  We met each day to talk about our experience so far at Yale, what we were learning, what we loved, what we didn’t love, and just genuinely get to know each other. Seeing these same people at the same time for 2 weeks was what led to creating such a deep bond with them. I got to learn more about them and their goals, we played games and I think it’s safe to say being with my family was probably my favorite part of YYGS!

Lectures

Just like seminars, the lectures are meant to expose us to new concepts and knowledge but at the same time give us that college-class feel, and so they did. For our first lecture, Professor Thomas Duffy presented to us the interdisciplinary connection between nursing and music and how this can be used to not only teach better but also improve observation skills.

From there we moved into the discovery of exoplanets where we discussed the different methods used by the industry to discover these planets, interstellar objects as well as stars.

Now we’ve talked about all this that was discovered through research but how sure can we be that all research done is true and correct? Are we choosing to believe researchers just because they’re called researchers? This is what we dug into in our 3^rd lecture, epistemology, and praxis.

For our last 2 lectures, we covered topics related more to the environment. Talking about what is endangering wetlands and other parts of the ecosystem and what role can we play to bring an end to that negative change. And, to close off the lectures, we were taught about how plants can detect the different seasons based on their genetical makeup, which genes are associated with which plant process, and how we can manipulate those genes to give plants the ability to survive in harsh conditions.

Exploring New Haven & the Yale campus

There’s no doubt that the Yale campus and New Haven in general are full of beautiful scenery. The old yet modern aesthetic surely caught my eye as I walked the streets for the first time. I had the pleasure of this being my first time in the US so every small aspect mattered like going to the Art gallery or Starbucks or passing by the robotics lab. Generally, it was full of picture-perfect sites that made the experience ten times better.

Speaker series

YYGS gives the chance to students to give a 5-minute presentation of their choice and we called this speaker series. Coming into YYGS I was excited about this and it met every expectation. I gave my presentation on the research I had been doing on the use of stem cells, 3D printing, and gene editing to create lab-grown organs. But what was even better was hearing all the other interesting presentations on topics such as failure, surviving the Aussie life, redlining, and stress. All these allowed us to connect even more based on our similar opinions on these topics.

Talent show

As young curious and ambitious individuals, we are all full of talents, and at YYGS they ensured that a light was shone on those through the talent show. I was able to choreograph and present a dance with one of the friends that I had made at the program and it was beyond fun. Connecting our love for dance and being able to spread that love to everyone watching was definitely everything! But of course, all the other presentations had me at the edge of my seat the whole time.

Capstone

We were put into of about 5 in our selected topic groups, with mine being medicine & health and we set out to formulate a research question, build the research on it, and present our findings. My team chose to tackle “How can we use regenerative medicine to improve the compatibility of prosthetics?” And with that, we came across regenerative peripheral nerve interfaces which help reduce neuroma pains in amputees and produce EEG signals that can be used to control the prosthetic with more accuracy. We presented our findings as a team followed by a Q&A session. It was impeccable to work with my teammates as we shared a bunch of similar interests.

Takeaways

·        Meeting new people is quite literally the beauty of life so you need to allow yourself to explore what life looks like outside your bubble. Learn about other cultures, and other ways of life, pick up an interest in others’ hobbies, and share ideas, passions, and goals, the advantages are endless!

·        Be open-minded. Yes, you may have your mind set on a goal and you strive to do anything and everything to achieve that but, in that process, don’t block your curiosity from other topics unrelated to yours. There’s never a negative side to learning something new.

·        Yale really is a community and an amazing one at that!

All these are just a few of my many wonderful experiences at YYGS. It was definitely one for the books and I look forward to more opportunities to explore and learn as I did.