By: Jack S. `17

Today was day two at the Global Student Leaders Summit. We started off the day with an incredible keynote speech from Dr. Jane Goodall. She was very motivational in her talk, as well as very assertive with her responses to student questions. One part I particularly liked was when she said that the mind and the heart of humans are no longer connected and it is our job to rejoin them. This meant that the innovative people are no longer empathetic in what they create, and our job is to make people think creatively with the needs of others in mind.

I was very fortunate to be offered one of the competitive internships at the summit. In my role as a social media intern I was tasked to document the conference as a “my story” on Snapchat. As an Intern, after the keynote I was able to attend a private press conference with Dr. Goodall. I was pretty nervous to be in a small intimate experience with an environmental rock star! We got to ask her questions, I asked if while during 55-year study of chimpanzees she ever wanted to study anything else. She replied that she would have liked to study all the animals but she really enjoyed studying hyenas. I asked this question because she studied chimpanzees for so long that I wanted to know more about the discipline required to study something for such a long period of time.

I think what is incredible about this whole trip is that there are so many people from all over who came together to talk about the environment and how we can change it. My experience with Dr. Goodall today and the rest of the conference motivated me to find solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. After traveling around all the different regions of Costa Rica, the summit is a wonderful culminating experience to give us the tools to bring about change in our local community. Jane Goodall taught us today to first act locally, then think globally, and that’s exactly what were doing.