Youth Leadership
From model rockets to Model United Nations
Yearsema Dagim spent her early high school years on ten STEM projects, then became President of her school's Model United Nations club and now wants to work as a diplomat.
Model rockets built from scratch with powder propellant. A carbon-capture machine designed to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. Those were two of the ten STEM projects Yearsema Dagim says she worked on in her early high school years. Science came first. Back then, as she puts it, "I was the kid obsessed with science."
"But as I grew, my eyes opened to the bigger picture," she says. She wanted, she says, "to tackle human problems on a global scale" with the same problem-solving mindset. So she took a leap into social studies. She became President of the Model United Nations club at her school, a magnet school in the Gibson School system, and "completely fell in love with diplomacy."
“Every big change starts with a story worth telling”
Yearsema Dagim
Right now, she says, she is at the very beginning of the next big chapter, "and if I'm being real, it feels a bit overwhelming but incredibly exciting."
"I’ve proven to myself what I can do locally," she says. She has the leadership from running her MUN club, a stack of certificates from years of spelling bee competitions, and individual awards for penmanship and for being "Best Reader of the Month." "But right now, all of that potential is just sitting within the walls of my high school," she says.
So she is building her profile from scratch and looking for scholarship grants, trying to get her foot in the door to study Political Science and International Relations abroad, "so I can eventually work as a diplomat."