Future Fletcherites?

This morning I dashed over to another Tufts building where 100 or so high school students were attending a day of discussion and activities related to international affairs and Fletcher.  Organized by two second-year Fletcher students along with Professor Kim Wilson, in coordination with the teacher of the high schoolers, this annual event gives the kids a chance to gather ideas about what an international career might look like.

The kids come over from Boston Latin Academy, and their teacher is a Fletcher graduate, Jeff Isen, F04, who left Fletcher, headed out into the world (Malawi, Sri Lanka) and found his true calling teaching international relations to Boston kids.  Most of the visitors today are seniors — just about to head off to college.  They don’t necessarily intend to pursue international relations for their college studies, but I hope they’ll leave here with a sense of the opportunities that might be open to them.  My role was to try to give them just the right amount of information: not too little (we want them to understand what Fletcher is), but also not too much (after all, graduate school may be ten or more years in the future for them — and high schoolers are always sleepy).  Ten minutes later, I yielded to a Fletcher student panel who made the pathway from high school, to college, to work, to Fletcher and an international career seem just a little more real.