Transformative.
That word — as well as words like exciting, overwhelming, unexpected, amazing, resonant — comes up often as Danielle Pal and Aviva Glassman describe their first-year experiences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Toronto.
Pal, 19, and Glassman, 18, met as freshman students in “Innovating for the Global,” offered by U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs. In small classes, students work collaboratively to tackle global challenges.
“It was a process of narrowing down an idea enough to find a changeable problem that you could solve through innovation,” explains Pal, who grew up in Toronto. Her group, for example, focused on preventing voluntary recruitment of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Glassman’s group developed a messaging app called Cricket that could be used by dissidents to bypass Internet censorship and spread news and important information during conflicts.
“We learned about global problem-solving from different perspectives, including business, the sciences, the arts and humanities, computer sciences,” explains Glassman, who grew up in Vancouver and whose grandparents, Rose Marie and Leon Glassman, are longtime supporters of the Hebrew University and CFHU. “It involved taking into account all the unique angles and working together collaboratively.”
Both young women jumped at the chance to continue in the spirit of academic innovation when the Munk School announced opportunities for students to study abroad at the Hebrew University. Pal took the Rothberg International School’s “Coexistence in the Middle East” course, while Glassman was part of the Rothberg’s “Entrepreneurship & Innovation” program. Both received scholarships that made their participation possible.
Both courses focused on hands-on experience and immersion. “We visited tech startups, did fieldwork,” says Glassman, of her group’s visits to Google, MobilEye, Stratisys and other drivers of Israel’s technological and environmental economies.
“I can count on one hand the number of times we were actually in the classroom,” says Pal, who, like Glassman, describes eight-hour days in the field, visiting a variety of sites and learning from diverse stakeholders. “In Israel and Palestine, I talked with soldiers, students, politicians, clergy, people on the ground: Jews and Arabs from East Jerusalem, Haifa, Tzfat, Palestinians in Ramallah and in refugee camps and Bethlehem.”
Being at the Hebrew University was a chance, says Pal, to reflect upon the collaborative problem-solving skills of her Munk course: “I was struck by how much people on both sides have in common, and yet how little contact people they had. Everyone wants the same thing, but has a different way of getting to the solution. And connecting with that raw human experience – I really enjoyed that. What Munk One and the Hebrew University have really driven home to me is that I don’t know anything except the perspective I’m sitting in, and to be cognizant of that in all situations.”
Danielle Pal at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Photo Credits to Jasmeet Khosa
Aviva Glassman with classmate at Israel’s Google headquarters.
Article written by Susan Goldberg, originally published in the Canadian Friends of Hebrew University’s Newsletter, “Connecting.” The original article can be accessed via the following link, and is located on page 10 http://cc.cfhu.org/docs/CFHU_Connecting_Fall_2015.pdf