GLOBAL CITIZEN
E X A M I N I N G M Y U N D E R S TA N D I N G OF THE WORLD
By Renee Bertrand ’21
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hen I first learned about the Perrin Fellowship, which gives the recipient a grant for independent postgraduate study, I thought of my grandparents. If they hadn’t left their respective homelands for new educational opportunities, I wouldn’t be here. Because of them, my family is a mixture of different cultures, nationalities and ethnicities. My grandparents were the ones who assured me it was OK to leave home at 14 to attend Phillips Exeter Academy. They have taught me to unabashedly pursue the world, to find love in new languages and to empathize with cultures I didn’t understand. Through my relentless determination to make something of myself and to better the community around me, I lost a part of my family’s teachings. When it came time to apply for the fellowship, I had seen my life as a series of goals to achieve, but I realized that’s not what I wanted. I imagined that’s not what James Perrin had wanted for himself either. When I was notified that I had won the fellowship, I decided to follow in my family’s footsteps and learn for myself that life is not a straight path from here to the next checkpoint, but a winding trail through green mountains. I chose to take the year to explore who in the world I wanted to be. The academic focus for this year was inspired by an English class I took my upper spring. The Academy had just moved classes online and adopted a pass/fail grading system due to COVID, and my lovely English teacher (now fellowship adviser) Ms. Genny Moriarty offered to let students complete a term-long independent project. I’ve always had a passion for exploring culture through writing,
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and so I decided to create pieces inspired by pre-colonized societies. The pieces made up my senior writing portfolio and won a silver medal and scholarship from the 2021 National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. They were published as part of the awards’ collection, Best Teen Writing 2021. I wanted my gap year to build on that body of creative fiction and focus on the real-world impacts of colonization. Colonization is the foundation for how countries across the world interact with each other. It has created many of the problems and successes that countries face today. As someone who will be studying international relations at Stanford next fall, who wants to be a future world leader, and whose heritage comes from both the colonized and the colonizer, colonization is a topic I need to explore. I hoped to explore a few guiding questions. How did a society change before and after colonization? What current problems arose because of it? What systems in history have created the global system we see today? Why are some countries so far behind in development? What does development even mean? Why are some societies still under colonization, while others are now independent? Are they truly independent? All in all, I wanted to see on a small scale how the world got to where it is today.
THE PLANNING PROCESS
When I accepted the Perrin Fellowship, in April 2021, I had just received my first COVID vaccine shot. The overwhelming feeling at the time was positive. Borders would open by the summer. Graduation was in-person
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