PEA Student Fellows to Share Experiences

Through the Student Council (StuCo) Summer Fellowship Program, uppers Claire Dauge Roth, Hillary Aristotle and Serena Cho, as well as senior Taylor Jean-Jacques, were provided the opportunity to spend their summers working on independent projects across the globe.

For the past four summers, StuCo has offered the Fellowship Program, designed to give rising uppers and seniors the opportunity to research a specific area of study or participate in a community service project with the guidance of a faculty member. When they return to Exeter in the fall, they present their projects to the community.

To become a fellow, students fill out an application along with a teacher recommendation. In past years, Exeter provided funding for students to allow Exonians to travel abroad without the financial burdens of transportation or living fees away from their homes. This year, however, none of the students received funding.

For Aristotle, the program enabled her to continue her research with a familiar subject. Prior to attending Exeter, she worked at a nonprofit organization for children aged 0-16 living with HIV in her hometown of Jakarta, Indonesia. Unfortunately, she had to pause her involvement with the organization during her first two years away at school. “When I found out about the Fellowship program, I figured it was time for me to continue my work back home,” Aristotle said.

“Most students our age are rarely, if ever, bestowed the trust to go out on their own into the ‘real world,’ so to speak. But this program gives responsible, intelligent, ambitious students a means to explore and learn beyond the classroom.”

Upon her return to Jakarta this summer, Aristotle commenced her work with UNAIDS Indonesia, the United Nations division specializing in HIV/AIDS policies. Through her work at both UNAIDS and the earlier nonprofit, Aristotle learned about the effect of HIV in Jakarta on both the micro and macro scale.

“From house visits in some of the poorer areas of the city to reading government documents on UNAIDS initiatives to tackle this epidemic, I went through it all,” Aristotle said. She hopes to share with Exeter her new insight into the dynamic between policies and the people they affect in third world countries.

Like Aristotle, Jean-Jacques’s summer fellowship work had already been set into motion before the summer of 2015. For the past two years, Jean-Jacques has been working in New York’s Silicon Alley at a technology start-up devoted to improving the education of children in developing countries.

Her summer fellowship work focused on technology infrastructure of schools in Haiti, where Jean-Jacques spent part of her summer. The start-up created an app with a digital archive of books in both French and Kreyol for the students’ use. She used her French to teach children in schools and orphanages how to use the app, and along the way, learned about the Haitian people and development of their country as a whole.

“Speaking to children and parents who were so passionate about education and had worked so hard in the classroom gave me a better understanding of the Haitian people,” she said. She found the media’s image of “helpless, poverty-stricken people” to be a misrepresentation. “I couldn’t assume these people were just like me but facing different struggles. That is a bit too reductive. It was something in between. I learned to look at them in their cultural, political and economic context,” Jean-Jacques explained.

Dauge-Roth’s project was inspired by her experience helping a woman in Rwanda receive a UN 1 percent fund grant for her small business in Kigali. Dauge-Roth decided to create a documentary which would include a variety of voices and opinions surrounding women’s status and gender inequality in Rwanda, which is especially prevalent in the wake of the mass rapes that occurred during the 1994 genocide.

She spent her summer in Rwanda interviewing local women and organizations that support women such as the Iriba foundation, SHE (Sustainable Health Enterprise) and the Imbuto foundation. Through her documentary, Dauge-Roth hopes to show what still needs to be improved in Rwanda as well as the positive movements and laws already in place that are changing women’s lives today.

On the other side of the world in the U.S., Cho’s curiosity was ignited after the recent uprisings against the lack of indictment of Darren Wilson and the speech delivered at Exeter by Bryan Stevenson regarding the flawed justice system in America. Cho said she wanted to investigate, learn and discuss how the system of mass incarceration fuels and is fueled by the still-prevalent racial injustice in America.

This summer, Cho had the opportunity to interview different social justice workers, professors, lawyers and the previously incarcerated from cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. She visited rehabilitation or legal assistance nonprofits and interviewed an ex-prisoner who served a long sentence in New York, as well as Ross Mirkarimi, the sheriff of San Francisco.

Additionally, Cho interned at Boston Mobilization, organizing protests against mass incarceration, participating in legislative meetings with senators and representatives and hosting youth workshops to raise awareness. Cho will make a documentary with the interviews to present to the Exeter community and is also writing an essay about the role of Asian Americans in ending racial injustice. “This project has motivated me to take active, brave steps to end mass incarceration and racial injustice,” she said.

Previous fellow Nick Diao ‘15, who created a documentary about struggling inner-city schools in New York last summer, said that the program allows students to follow their own intellectual curiosity with a new sense of freedom. “Most students our age are rarely, if ever, bestowed the trust to go out on their own into the ‘real world,’ so to speak,” Diao said. “But this program gives responsible, intelligent, ambitious students a means to explore and learn beyond the classroom.”

While the opportunities created by the StuCo Fellowship Program greatly impact the participants’ lives, perhaps an equally valuable aspect of the program is that it is a shared experience for the whole school. The program is a rare way for students to increase their global awareness by actually taking part in the program, and by simply sitting in the audience of the Assembly Hall in the fall, learning and engaging in the presentation of the topic. As Dauge-Roth noted, “[the program] brings detailed, analyzed subjects to our school and community by our community.”