650 Scholars, One Stage: My Yale Young Global Scholars Experience

I walked into this camp nervous. There were 650 people there and it felt like all of them had already figured out something I hadn't. I kept assuming everyone around me was smarter, and that's a hard feeling to shake. It's tough to talk to people like you belong when half your brain is checking whether you actually do.

Then the work started and I stopped having time to think about it.

For the capstone, my group built EquiTea, a nonprofit plan to help Adivasi tea estate workers in Assam deal with a climate that's basically working against them. We spent hours just mapping out how the whole thing spirals: heat and bad rain hurt tea yields, lower yields mean estates cut wages and stop investing, and then workers have even less cushion for whatever hits them next. There wasn't one fix for that, so we ended up building the plan around climate training, a sensor network across a hundred estates, land certificates through PMAY, and Small Tea Grower registration, pieces that only work if they're tied together. Writing an actual $67,300 grant request, with real budget lines and timelines out to 2035 and real questions about what happens if we can only help some families and not others, didn't feel anything like a classroom assignment. I had to think seriously about people I'm never going to meet.

The seminars threw me in directions I wasn't expecting. In the water seminar I started seeing something I drink every day as this whole history of colonialism and quiet inequality, how the Industrial Revolution basically turned water from something sacred into something you buy. That idea ended up becoming the backbone of my speech. In the hunger seminar, I learned food insecurity usually isn't about there not being enough food. It's about who gets access, and how something as boring as a grocery chain deciding not to build in a certain neighborhood can quietly wreck a community's health for a generation.

One seminar, Who Gets to Make the Rules, ran a full COP simulation, and I got assigned Saudi Arabia. A petrostate. I had to argue from that position, not mine, holding the line against binding phase-out language while Tuvalu said 1.5 degrees wasn't a target, it was survival, and the EU pushed for enforceable timelines. Standing up and defending "emissions reduction matters more than banning energy outright" while knowing exactly what that costs other people stuck with me more than anything I've read about climate justice. Sitting across from Bangladesh's delegate, who's responsible for basically nothing in terms of emissions and is still near the top of every vulnerability list, and having to hold a red line anyway, that's not something you get from a textbook.

The symposium was its own kind of stress test. My team built a country, Acempur, from scratch: constitution, a 60-seat National Assembly with reserved seats for the Indigenous Seerunian population, an independent Anti-Corruption Commission, a Land Claims Commission to deal with colonial-era land theft. Then we got hit with a live crisis: a fire at the Harwick Gold Mine killed eleven workers, all from rural Seerunian communities, and the foreign mining company was already trying to reopen, citing some colonial-era contract. We had maybe an hour to decide: suspend the mine and risk arbitration and investor confidence, or let it reopen and look like we cared more about profit than Indigenous lives. We suspended it, launched an independent investigation, and funded emergency medical response by reallocating existing money instead of taking on debt. Defending that in front of people, tradeoffs and all, was the first time I'd had to make a real call instead of just talk about one.

The lectures, wildlife biology, disinformation tactics, how climate treaties actually get built, kept pointing at the same thing from different angles: a lot of the world runs on systems nobody notices. A lion pride, a social media algorithm, a COP negotiation. Someone designed all of them, and someone benefits. I catch myself asking that question about almost everything now.

Then there was the speech. At some point in all this I got to talk on stage about something I actually cared about, water, and the quiet ways it fails people who trust it. Every time I did it, I felt a little less shaky. Not because the nerves went away, but because I actually had something to say.

The hard part wasn't the speech itself. It was deciding to put in a piece of my own story, that I had lead poisoning as a kid. That felt exposed in a way I hadn't planned for. Most people at camp knew me as the person who was good at this stuff, not as someone who'd actually lived through the danger I was up there warning everyone about. Saying it out loud meant letting people see something I usually don't bring up. But once it was out, the speech made more sense. It needed that.

Getting picked as one of 40 out of 650 speakers still doesn't feel totally real. But on the last day, what I keep coming back to isn't really the honor. It's the friends I wasn't expecting to make, the capstone that got me thinking in systems instead of talking points, arguing a COP position I didn't believe in and actually understanding why someone would hold it, governing a made-up country under real pressure instead of just discussing theory. I'm proud, but not because I proved I belonged there. More because at some point I stopped needing to prove it and just showed up.

I came in nervous and out of place. I'm leaving a little more open, and glad this camp gave me room to get there.