Great. Thank you.
This is fantastic. I’m excited to keep in conversation. We’ll share the ideas with the students. We’ll be thinking about them with the SDGs lens, and then well share more details on the 17th of January.
Oh, man. That’s great.
Yes, OK. Very good.
I agree.
We’ll go from there. That is a source.
Even more so when you’re more remote. I see what you’re saying. Yeah, it’s interesting. Maybe on that point, I’m curious if there’s any experiences in Taipei that you think would be a shame if our students missed while they were here.
I see what you’re saying.
Yes, and that is the game-changer as well. I go back and forth on that because I do think there’s still something that you can’t capture yet, perhaps maybe one day we could, by being in person.
Yes.
Ooh.
I dream of times where we might have even more futuristic, like probably doing augmented-realty learning or ways that we can merge the physical and digital even more.
That’s great. That’s part of our students’…A lot of people know about Minerva through the global travel, but our students take their classes through a platform that we’ve designed. We very much focus as well on access to education, globally, and how technology can be this partner in starting that.
Like, “This is familiar.” [laughs]
You were there.
Thank you. You’ve already met some of our students digitally. Now you’ll get to meet them in person.
It will fall within there.
Right. We’ll follow up to confirm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. I completely agree.
Is going to be relevant. Yeah, that’s the thing, and we don’t want to…
I love that. That’s something we definitely try to emphasize. The students are not the first ones to think of these challenges. There’s people that have been working on these and to learn from their experience. That would be fantastic.
Very cool. I feel like that’s a great follow-up. It’s sharing the projects if there is any one that we think naturally align with SDGs, and then checking out the website to see if there is.
Connection, yeah, and also would just be interesting.
I like it.
A new library code.
At the beginning. Perfect.
Great, and then we can find the social innovation platform.
Yeah, that’s a great resource. Is that on here too?
There’s a break.
April.
That would be great. I think a few of them are super passionate. They come to Minerva for the opportunity to do comparative studies in different cities on a certain topic. I’m sure there are some that are more civic engagement involved or social impact.
Interesting. It makes me want to share the list of projects that students are working on.
The different one, yeah.
What?! Tell me more about that. What do you mean?
In terms of infrastructure, there’s not something that comes to mind. It’s more about the connections and broadening.
I think that would be their unique needs in some ways. What we focus on is connecting them to people that are working in these areas that they can learn from. When I think about a sandbox, and I love that analogy, what we think about often is the people ...
That’s a great question. It was interesting. Because the students are here in their fourth year, they are working on what we call their capstone project, which is very similar to a thesis. Yes, each of them come with a project in mind that they’re investigating.
We do make lots of references to Harry Porter.
They spent their first two semesters in San Francisco, of their first year, then they go to Seoul, South Korea, Hyderabad, India, Berlin, Germany, Buenos Aires, Argentina, London, UK, and then they end in Taipei, before going back to San Francisco.
I think what’s cool about it is, we hope that students leave Minerva being able to go to any city in the world, and then approach it in a similar way. How can you think of a city as a place to learn from and unlock in many ways? I ...
In the same way, you might also think about a Department of Social Sciences, we think of people that are working in those industries that we could connect students to, to learn from, and see how they’re actually in practice doing these things. We have no physical campus, and we ...
In the way you might think about a campus having a library, there are public libraries in every city that we go to, so using the civic spaces.
That’s why we immerse our students in seven cities around the world. That’s how we think about the city more creatively. We’ve been using this phrase of even experiential professors or people that are professors of practice, that we can get insight into different elements.
We’re meeting with different people this week to ask, what can you uniquely learn from Taipei, and how might we be into design experiences? We very much believe in experiential learning, not just sitting in a lecture hall and being spoken to, but actually engaging and actively working with knowledge.
Sure. We believe in using the city as a campus. We don’t have a physical campus beyond the residence halls that our students live in together. That’s actually one of the reasons and motivations for me being here this week as well, is to understand more.
Yes, definitely. Where to begin? There’s many things about Minerva that are new and different. Each of these elements, I can go deeper in.
