Right now, you might be both excited and nervous to start the GYEL program. You might have all these ideas floating around your head with stars in your eyes and an endless motivation. I’m here to tell you that all that is never going to fade in this program, and, in fact, it will most likely grow.
The GYEL Program is more of a webinar style program where we can discuss about the activities. Each session is three hours long, but it won’t feel that long because the sessions are just packed to the brim with learning and activities. My advice to you is to just participate, or if you are a bit soft-spoken and shy (such as myself), listen. The activities they give us and the knowledge you gain through this program is unique and something that is very valuable and hard to find. Even though I didn’t participate in discussions out loud as much as others, l’ve still learned through just listening. Through this program, I’ve been inspired to create change in the world, tackling one problem I found at a time. I love research, so I think that’s why I found many parallels between research and this program: With these GYEL webinars and research homework, you are exposed to a lot of different problems, and one of them will stick with you. It will be something you realize you are very passionate about, so my advice is to see how you can contribute to solving this problem. Another thing you will learn is that you aren’t too young to make a change; join with others to create change and find ways to create change yourself. The opportunities are endless as you will soon learn. The biggest “aha” moment I had during this course was when, almost every session Ms. Hannah would start us off talking about how we can make change and become global leaders through our participation in this course. This showed me that even though the SDGs are addressing huge and complex problems, we can actually be a part of the process to help achieve them. As high school students, I feel like we feel we can’t make major change because of our age and inexperience, but we can because we can take these complex and challenging problems and break them down, taking them step by step. With the tools we’ve learned throughout this course, like Systems Thinking and learning how to define the problem, we can actually break down these problems to find solutions. The world is filled with complex and interconnected problems that need simple and elegant solutions. Through this course, I realized that a lot of people, myself included in the beginning, don’t know a lot about the problems the SDGs were trying to solve beyond the surface level. We might know about pollution and gender inequality and poverty and world hunger, but we don’t know the extent to which they actually affect the quality of life of millions of people. I am now trying to build a nonprofit, starting with my community and trying to expand its reach, that is all about educating the public. I am in the planning phase right now, and I want to create a branch focused on the SDGs and educating the public (from elementary/ preschool students to high schoolers) about the actual impact of these issues.