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Global & Environmental Studies Certificate (GESC)

About Me

Welcome! My name is Anya Sastry and I am a 17-year old, first-generation Indian American student at The Loomis Chaffee School. I am from Barrington, Illinois and when I am not in school, I focus much of my time and energy towards political activism, specifically that which is related to the environment. Over the past few years, I have become more and more involved in climate action and have led nationwide actions to help the environment. Besides politics and activism, I love books, videography/film, and spending time with friends. After I graduate from Loomis, I plan to pursue two simultaneous Bachelor’s degrees in International Relations and Legal Studies in Business at Tulane University. Thank you for visiting my site and I hope you enjoy!

–The picture on the right is from my travels to Portugal with my school’s Model UN delegation. In the picture, I am standing in front of the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon, Portugal.–

Coursework

HPRESS:
World History: The Making of Our Modern World
CL European History
CL Comparative Government and Politics
Social Psychology

Foreign Language:
CL Spanish V: Literature

Music:
Concert Choir

GESC Elective:
Model UN: Participating in a multitude of Model United Nations conferences, as well as the European Model Government conference in Portugal, contributed to my development as a global and environmental scholar as I was able to interact with youth from around the world and debate past, present, and future world issues. Being able to utilize diplomatic skills and focus extensively on politics and international relations from different perspectives has allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the world around me, as well as allowed me to begin developing policy-making and problem-solving skills that I can later use in the real world.

Assignments:
– Click here for a response paper that I wrote for my CL Comparative Government & Politics class. For every unit we cover, we write a response paper addressing any topic within the chapter. This specific response paper was written during the unit on Mexico and it addresses the divisive issue of immigration.

– Click here for a presentation I created for my CL Spanish V: Literature course. The assignment was directed towards the different provinces of Spain and I focused my presentation specifically on Cataluña, its history, environment, culture, economy, and politics.

Community

  • Model United Nations
  • World Bulletin
  • PRISM
  • Loomis Chaffee Climate Action
  • L-IRIS Community Service
  • Norton Fellowship

Travel

I typically go to India during the summers to visit my grandparents and extended family, and stay for about 3-4 weeks at a time. During the course of our visit, we stay with my mother’s family in Calicut, Kerala and then later travel to Bangalore, Karnataka to visit my dad’s family.

During the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to visit Tanzania through the Loomis Chaffee Scholar program as part of a community service trip. We stayed at an orphanage in a small town outside of Arusha, and for the first two weeks of the trip, we worked with the children at the orphanage and assisted in the construction of a library and a bio gas chamber at a new orphanage site. For the last week of the trip, we had the opportunity to stay with two different local tribes and go on a safari and mountain hike, which was a sharp contrast to the more urban aspects of the previous two weeks.

Reflections

  1. The Treasures of Tanzania
  2. Tanzania Journal Entry

During my junior year Head’s Holiday, I had the opportunity to travel with a group of Loomis students and faculty to Washington D.C. and focus on politics, current events, and active participation in democracy. As someone who is a complete political junkie, this trip was truly amazing. We visited places like the Smithsonian Museum for African American History & Culture, the NPR recording studio and met with local social justice organizers who are fighting for gun control in the impoverished sectors of D.C.

Reflections

  1. D.C. Musings

Finally, as a delegate of the Loomis Model UN team, I had the opportunity to travel to Portugal over the 2019 Thanksgiving break for a Yale European Government conference. During the week leading up to the conference, Loomis partnered with an organization called “We Hate Tourism,” and while exploring the city, examined the impact of the tourism industry on Lisbon and the country as a whole. This was an exciting trip and I learned so much about a country that for the most part was completely off my radar.

Capstone

For my capstone project, I was initially a Shared_Spaces Ambassador working with a couple of other GESC students to design and host an event for Loomis students in the Shared Spaces portal. The Shared Spaces portal was supposed to create meaningful human connections between people separated by distance and difference.

As the global pandemic has now closed schools, businesses, and public spaces, we are unable to carry out our original plan. Instead, Emma Tishler, Calabria DeFazio and I have created a video that incorporates footage from other GESC students that shows how we are still engaging in global and environmental studies during this time.