Three Penn students headed to Colombia this month to mingle with Nobel laureates

Three Penn students represented the University as part of a youth delegation at the 16th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Bogota, Colombia.

The 16th Nobel Summit marks the first time the Ivy Council — an organization that acts as a platform for the collaboration of students across the Ivy League — decided to to invite one student government representative from each of the schools to attend.

The summit was a four-day event from Feb. 2 to Feb. 5 that focused on the development of global peace. It was attended by 28 Nobel Peace laureates and several world leaders, including the president of Colombia and Mikhail Gorbachev. Additionally, the summit invited a youth delegation of nearly 600 students from around the world to participate.

The group initially asked College senior and President of the Undergraduate Assembly Kat McKay to accompany the Penn delegation. However, because McKay was unable to attend, College junior and Vice President of the UA Sola Park represented the Penn student government body at the summit.

“Including the student government leaders was a good idea on the Ivy Council’s part just because if [the students] have great ideas on inter-Ivy collaboration they would be able to share them,” Park said. “That was one thing they really wanted to push forward at this summit I think.”

Park said her experience working with students from across the Ivy League showed her the collective impact the schools could have on wider social issues, which she got to witness firsthand when Ivy League student body leaders signed the “No Apologies Initiative” presented by the student body president of Brown University.

“Just looking at that, even though this initiative calls on getting rid of app fees for low-income students, I think it really goes beyond that,” Park said. “Something I really want to work towards with other Ivy League schools is looking at current university culture and seeing what really factors into this current culture that we have of being elite and exclusive and how that really feeds into education inequality in general.”

College sophomore Sarah Jacobs and College sophomore Olufemi Palmer also attended the conference as members of Ivy Inspire — a new inter-Ivy student newspaper founded by the Ivy Council.

Jacobs said her “optimism was restored” after working with people dedicated to enacting positive social change in a negative political climate.

“I think the biggest thing I took away from attending was that for every negative piece of legislation produced or rhetoric presented in our new political climate, there is also a group of incredible people who are working silently, day by day to combat them even when they aren’t in the headlines,” she said.