Dragons Program Featured in the Wall Street Journal

The WSJ forgot to give us exact credits, yet we’re excited to see our Bridge Year Program featured in the education section of the Wall Street Journal! The piece is titled Welcome to College. Take a Year Off.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Peter Scharer, a freshman at Princeton, spent last year studying Hindi and Urdu and volunteering at a school in northern India as part of Princeton’s Bridge Year program. The university launched that offering for 20 students in 2009, and this year it is funding 38 students doing service projects in Bolivia, China, India, Indonesia or Senegal. Princeton covers basic living expenses and offers need-based aid for travel and incidentals like visa paperwork.

” ‘I was stepping away from the cycle that I had been in,’ said Mr. Scharer, now 19 years old. He said the program was ‘a powerful way to get a different perspective on the world, better understand myself, [and] better understand what I might be interested in studying.’ Mr. Scharer said he has a new outlook on things like consumption and waste after seeing an open dump in India, and on the best way to offer aid to a needy community. He just finished a class on the interplay between national identity and language.”

You can read more reflections from Peter Scharer’s Princeton Bridge Year India group on our Yak board, or learn more about our Bridge Year Programs in India, Bolivia, China, Indonesia, and Senegal on Princeton’s website. Or head over to the Wall Street Journal to  read the full article!