Your Best Year Yet Chapter 3
EACH YEAR of our lives is precious. We only get so many of them, so how we use and plan each one is the mark of a life well lived. Baret Scholars’ mission is to make its year the best yet of our students’ lives. We did not say the best ever. That would defeat our purpose: to serve as a foundational experience for many best-yet years ahead as our graduates move through levels of fulfillment and ac- complishment in their lives. What makes this Baret year so special? Why make this investment? Through thousands of hours of creative design, research, and listening to those who have gone before us, we’ve worked to make the Baret Scholars year a transformative one. Here are our hopes for every one of our graduates. 1 The Best Start and Finish to Your College Experience WHETHER YOU are already in college or get- ting ready to be, Baret is designed to en- hance the value of your college years. Bar- et’s design has been informed by research conducted by the U.S. Gap Year Associa- tion, which collaborated with universities to track the performance of gap year stu- dents. Unsurprisingly, what these studies show is “most students who take a gap year end up performing at higher levels than would have been predicted.”
Baret does not want graduates to stum- ble towards their university years but begin them at the top of their game, not a year be- hind but a year ahead. Fresher, more ma- ture, more informed, more worldly, better advised, and more inspired than their likely envious, battle-weary peers, they come to college with an invaluable asset: purpose, their very own purpose. Baret helps bring that purpose into fo- cus through multiple facets of our program. We flood our students’ consciousness with a variety of experiences and information, trusting our students to assimilate and find meaning from the different elements. Across the year, we inform by a low-pres- sure, steady flow of well-designed “crash courses” in each of the seven cultures we will visit. We curate selected books and films. We inspire by bringing students up close with 250 Baret recruited, Morning Program speakers who have started and led organizations and movements. We want our students to rub up against greatness in oth- er people. And their assigned Fellows advise students in small group sessions every day and in one-on-one get togethers every week. Across the year, we help each student think through their college time which lies ahead. Each student completes the Baret year with a personalized, purposeful college plan.
graduate programs in the decades ahead, interviewers will be fascinated by an ap- plicant’s time at Baret. Why? Because the Baret experience will be viewed by inter- viewers as something distinct from virtu- ally every other competing applicant. How many other applicants will have spent thoughtful time in China, India, Africa, the Middle East, South America, the US and Europe? Almost none. Baret Scholars is a substantive, lifelong addition to one’s CV and, with each passing year, it becomes more so as Baret’s reputation spreads around the world. Despite a rise in nationalism, according to World Bank research “there is no evi- dence that the world economy has entered an era of deglobalization.” Even with the lingering effects of Covid-19, world trade reached a record $32 trillion dollars in 2022. Large multinational employers and small start-ups alike will increasingly seek team members with extensive inter- national awareness and experience. Bar- et brings that to its graduates. It is not a casual, touristy, few-week trip to Europe which would be disregarded by interview- ers. From early orientation to graduation, it is a year-long immersive experience in the entire world. Future employers will value that and understand they could “post” a Baret Scholar not just in their home country, but in many countries. Baret graduates’ career opportunities also increase because their own view of what is personally possible expands. In their Baret year they see what success looks like. They hear the life stories of founders. They begin to think not just about what they want to do, but where they might like to begin their pursuits. They start to imag- ine possibilities for themselves: from what field to pursue to what they might like to find on their own. They imagine how to lead a life of significance. 3 Understanding the World
to called Cultural Literacy. In an America then awash with highly progressive (and important) educational reform theories, he put forth the view that, without a grasp of certain background information, a person had little chance of entering the American mainstream. He believed knowing how to read and write was not enough. To do so well you needed to know who Lincoln and the Roosevelts were and, even roughly when the Civil War was fought. The title of one of his later works, How to Educate a Citizen: The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation , could not make his point better. Hirsch’s writings were focused main- ly on citizenry in the United States, but his thoughts hold true when thinking of the world as a whole. To be real citizens of this planet, we must know more than a bit about it. We must all become geog- raphers in the broader sense of the word, understanding not just maps but the hu- man-constructed phenomena going on within those lines on a page. A Chinese Mandarin teacher once said, “A second language is a second soul.” A broader and deeper understanding of the world is like another language. Almost osmotically, it morphs us into beings no longer confined by our original geographic boundaries. The more practical effects of Baret Scholars, like the aforementioned better college experience and more meaning- ful careers, follow from this deeper un- derstanding. To make the world a better place you need to understand it first. As one Brazilian parent advised his daughter: “Go see the world and then come home and change it.” 4 Seeing Home through a New Lens THE PHRASE “gap year” has become synon- ymous with international experience. And, to be exact, for Baret students, six sevenths of their Baret year will be outside their home country or region. But for most of our stu- dents, one month of the Baret year will be
FOR THOSE ALREADY IN COLLEGE
“Perhaps the best way of all to get the full benefit of a ‘time-off’ is to postpone entrance to college for a year. For more than four decades, Harvard has recommended this option, indeed proposing it in the letter of admission. Now more than one hundred Harvard students defer college until the next year. The results have been uniformly positive. Harvard’s daily student newspaper, The Crimson, reported (5/19/2000) that students who had taken a year off found the experience ‘so valuable that they would advise all Harvard students to consider it.’” WILLIAM FITZSIMMONS, DEAN OF ADMISSIONS AND FINANCIAL AID, HARVARD COLLEGE
FOR CURRENT college students, Baret is an opportunity to get the most of your re- maining years. Most of the benefits not- ed above apply equally to students in the midst of their college experience. And there are more. Students who take a year for exploration “mid-college” bring back new and different perspectives which guide and inform their crucial last years of college, the ones which often immediately precede first employment.
FOR THOSE BEGINNING COLLEGE
2 Broader Career Opportunities
THE “THOUSAND-YARD stare” is a phrase of- ten used to describe the blank, unfocused gaze of combatants who have become emo- tionally detached from the traumatizing things they’ve been through. Regrettably, it is an apt characterization of how many—or even most—just graduated high school se- niors feel after slogging through school from age 3 to age 18 to get into a desired college and then excel there. Exhausted by the pro- cess of gaining entry into college, they are not really ready for it. They are like writers starting to write a novel, but with no out- line, no context, no plan, no vision.
MARLYN E. MCGRATH, DIRECTOR OF ADMISSIONS, HARVARD COLLEGE CHARLES DUCEY, ADJUNCT LECTURER IN PSYCHOLOGY, HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
PREDICTION: In every interview for post- college jobs, in-college internships, and
IN 1988, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., a University of Vir- ginia professor, penned a forceful manifes-
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BARET SCHOLARS
BACKGROUND & VISION
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