Academy Students Dialogue with Peers, Industry Leaders at National Youth Policy Summit

by Michael Crocker, Academy Avatar

This summer three Gatton Academy students were given the opportunity to attend and participate in the 2011 National Youth Policy Summit.

Seniors Rachel Metcalfe, Samantha McKean, and Melanie Hurst spent one week in Keystone, Colorado where McKean says they “worked together to create a blueprint for a solution to the current energy crisis.”

Students were selected based on their answer to an essay.   Hurst says that before the program began a great amount of effort was put into research and idea development. “We had to research an energy topic as well as a stakeholder to represent at the conference,”  she said.  At the summit, Hurst noted she worked with 35 students and 3-4 main instructors in the topic area. She also worked with the representatives of the stakeholder companies.

McKean says that at the conference around 40 students from a variety of National Consortium of Specialized Secondary Schools of Math, Science, and Technology schools each were assigned a different company that had to do with energy.  The group eventually completed an 80 page policy recommendation booklet.

The  group loved the Colorado setting of the conference.  The mountain landscape in which students studied was equally enjoyable to their research. “Colorado [was] beautiful,” according to Hurst. “We were at 10,000-12,000 feet the entire trip and was right up there with mountains.”  Although she said it was cold, she enjoyed being able to “say we threw snowballs in June.”

Metcalfe said her favorite part of the trip was  a late evening hike where they got to see the sunset over the mountains to the west.  McKean added that  “the mountains were a really nice reminder of what we were working toward, which is a cleaner, healthier environment.”

Because all three Aacademy students were assigned a different company and had different experiences they all took away different lessons.

Hurst found that  the real-world applications of the program expanded just beyond content knowledge.  “The most important thing I learned was how to compromise and negotiate so that everyone wins a little in the end,” she said.

McKean talked more about how much she learned about energy and how it relates to the economy.  “I learned a lot about how different parts of the economy would suffer if we completely just dropped oil, which is a major reason why we haven’t yet.”

Metcalfe found having to take a side in the debate to be very enlightening.  “I gained so much more knowledge about all the aspects of our national energy dependency, especially from interesting perspectives.”

Colorado, Keystone, Michael Crocker, National Youth Policy Summit, NCSSSMST, Youth Policy Summit