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EPIB Trail
Volume 7, Issue 1
Interview with Melissa Lee Co‐Founder, Chief Execu ve Officer of The GREEN Program By: Arcadia Lee Papalski
Mission Statement: The GREEN Program’s purpose is to enhance the academic life experience of passionate students and empower them to become socially responsible, innovative, and environmentally conscious leaders of tomorrow. Their programs offers to bridge the gap between textbook learning and real-time industry experience by taking students behind the scenes of the world’s leading clean energy and sustainability initiatives. What do they do? The GREEN Program designs short-term immersion programs in the most exciting places on earth, which are epicenters of innovative technologies as well as bucket-list travel destinations. They are working alongside the top universities to develop courses and embed the GREEN educational model into existing curriculum. As a Commitment Partner to the Institute of International Education’s Generation Study Abroad initiative, The GREEN Program strives to raise higher education standards, and to increase opportunities for students to study abroad as a part of their undergraduate and graduate studies. While traveling in Peru, I decided to interview The GREEN Program’s Co-Founder, Melissa Lee, to find out more about the program. As a Global Ambassador for The GREEN Program, I want more students to find out about great opportunities that can inspire us to accomplish the “unattainable.”
Arcadia: What motivates you to develop relationships with foreign countries in order to provide a higher education to American students? Melissa: Developing relationships with foreign countries is just something that should be done by everyone no matter what age, discipline, or industry if they actually want to make some significant impact during their lifetime. If you restrict yourself to one culture or mindset, I challenge you to step out of it with an open mind, and you will be pleasantly surprised with how much more the rest of the world can offer with regards to sharing information, providing solutions, and idea generation. Not only American students, but most students around the world are sheltered from the positives and negatives of what is actually going on in our world today and what they can learn from other countries first hand. Education can be found in the classroom, but The GREEN Program takes it a step further and brings classroom lessons to reality, and empowers students on levels where a typical classroom setting cannot.
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