Best and Brightest Win Chance to be ‘Athens Fellows’

 

A new group of eager young Greek Americans, some of them fresh with diplomas from the highest-ranked universities in the U.S., is on their way to Athens this summer.

Selected from hundreds of candidates from around the country, some of these top-flight students have never before stepped foot in the land of their ancestors. Now, as Athens Fellows, they will get a chance to see “the new Greece” for themselves.

 

Sponsored by the Next Generation Initiative, an educational foundation based in Washington, DC, the Athens Fellowship is the first international leadership program for outstanding U.S. undergraduate and graduate students which focuses on Greece.

 

The winning candidates of this year’s Athens Fellowship competition include students from famous Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, Yale and Brown Universities, Dartmouth College and the Universities of Pennsylvania, Chicago, Florida, as well as from New York University, MIT and Stanford.

 

“The Athens Fellowship is definitely attracting a new generation of high-achieving students from our global community to Greece,” according to Leon Stavrou, the executive director and co-founder of the Next Generation Initiative, which created the Athens Fellowship program in partnership with Greece’s Secretariat General of Information.  

 

For both the Greek government and Stavrou’s Initiative, these students represent the leading edge of a new generation of young men and women around the world who are ready to make their own connections to their Greek heritage, and to Greece.

 

“The Athens Fellowship program is, for us, an opportunity, to present to young Greek Americans the new face of Greece,” says Greece’s Secretary General of Information Panos Livadas.

 

There is a new, confident and competitive Greece that’s unfamiliar to many young Greeks in the U.S. and around the world — but Greece’s Livadas isn’t willing to just sit back and wait for it to be discovered by a new generation. He is actively reaching out to the next generation with his message about Greece.

 

“A country widely acknowledged for her beautiful landscapes and her cultural heritage of the ancient Greek civilization, has recently emerged as the key player in economy, energy, maritime industry and exports, in a region of 160 million residents,” says Secretary General Livadas. “Greece is a factor of stability, peace and growth in Southeast Europe and is being heavily investing on infrastructure and transportation, becoming the crossroad between East and West, Southeast Europe and Western Europe.”

 

“These are recent developments that Greek Americans haven’t had the opportunity to recognize,” concludes Secretary General Livadas, “And this is exactly what they are offered through the Athens Fellowship Program: the chance to meet the new extroverted, modern face of Greece.”

 

By all reports, this is a Greece that’s new and exciting to the generation which the Athens Fellows represent.

 

In fact, the young men and women of what he calls “the next generation” are hungry to learn about this new Greece, according to Stavrou. “Of the 5,000 Greek American students connected to our program, and the thousands of other American college students who have some Greek heritage, a surprising number of them have never been to Greece. They are proud of being Greek. But when you say ‘Greece’ to them, they generally think of their grandfather’s Greece,” says Stavrou. “They have no idea just how much Greece has transformed itself over the past few decades.”

 

“The Greece of the successful 2004 Olympics,” continues Stavrou, “is a very different Greece from the one they’ve heard about from their parents and grandparents. The Greece of high-tech innovation, the Greece that is a growing, global powerhouse in shipping — this is a new Greece that the next generation is really just becoming aware of. And this is the Greece that our Athens Fellows are getting an intensive, first-hand look at.”

 

Just as the first group of Athens Fellows did during the Initiative’s successful pilot program in the summer of 2007, this year’s Athens Fellows will undertake an innovative, fast-paced and very intensive program of high-level seminars and master classes with leaders in government and various fields and industries. 

 

According to former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Barbara Spyridon Pope, who was the team leader for the first group of Athens Fellows in 2007, the students were amazed by the wide spectrum of movers and shakers — from government ministers, scientists and academics, to ship-owners, newspaper editors and even the head of the Athens Stock Exchange — Athens Fellows met with during their Fellowship.

 

“The leaders we met with were surprised with the calibre of our students, and the questions they  asked — just as the Athens Fellows were impressed with the fascinating insights and frank assessments offered by the leaders they met with, in and out of government,” said Spyridon Pope, one of the Initiative’s founding board members.

 

The Next Generation Initiative aims to seed the Greek American community with a cadre of future leaders, drawn from the best and brightest of today’s students, who have had opportunities through programs like the Athens Fellowship, to learn directly from leaders and experts and see how they look at some of the most important developments and pressing issues facing them today.

 

According to co-founder Stavrou, the Next Generation Initiative is the first independent effort in the Greek American community to focus solely on reaching out to the next generation. “No one else is focused exclusively on reaching out to students, and meeting their needs. We’re not only helping them connect with their heritage and with each other — we’re helping them take on the world, and change it.”

 

To do so, Stavrou’s Initiative brings Next Generation students together with world-class innovators and leaders — from scientists and senators, to film-makers and financiers — while creating new ways to help them advance their future careers, such as helping students find internships and work with mentors in different fields.

 

The Next Generation Initiative got off the ground when a group of interested leaders — including Barbara Spyridon Pope, former CIA director George Tenet, journalist George Stephanopoulos, high-tech entrepreneur Ted Leonsis, MIT scientist and inventor Dr. George Hatsopoulos, Gates Foundation president Sylvia Mathews, former governor Michael Dukakis, Senator Paul Sarbanes and NYU President Emeritus John Brademas — offered to be the first to open their doors to next generation students, hoping to help inspire the students, and set an example for other leaders to follow.

 

“The outstanding leaders who are behind this effort are doing this because it’s all about giving back. This initiative is not about them — it’s not about who’s important, powerful or famous, or what’s in it for them. For these leaders, it’s all about the students. It’s all about the next generation. Frankly,” says Stavrou, ”they’re involved because these kids are amazing. When you meet the students I’ve met, see what they are doing, and see where they are headed, you can’t help but be excited and want to get involved.”

 

How to Apply

 

The Initiative welcomes applications from all outstanding undergraduate and graduate university students of Hellenic descent, especially those Greek American university students who have previously had only fairly limited opportunities to spend much time in Greece. This invitation is particularly extended — but not limited — to those highly-qualified undergraduate students in the fields of political science, economics, finance, international relations, journalism and related fields.

 

The 2009 Call for Applications for next year’s Athens Fellowship will go out early next year. Students who wish to be among the first to receive the Call for Applications should write to athensfellowship@hellenext.org and indicate their interest in recieving further information about this program.

 

To stay informed regarding all the Next Generation Initiative’s programs, students can register as a Next Generation student using our student online registration form. Registration as a Next Generation Student is FREE.