Yasmine Geverk was 13 when her classmates in Moss, Norway, put her on the youth municipal council. She was the one whose hand always went up. “I’ll take one for the class,” she says. This fall she is a freshman at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, one of 37 international students arriving as the school’s first Davis United World College Scholars.
The cohort represents 22 nations and is spread across seven BU schools and colleges. Davis UWC, based at Vermont’s Middlebury College, is the largest source of financial aid for international undergraduates in the United States. It awards scholarships to graduates of 18 designated high schools worldwide. BU President Melissa Gilliam arranged the university’s entry into the program’s network of more than 100 American colleges and universities. The goal is 80 enrolled scholars by the end of the second year.
The awards cover each student’s full demonstrated need: tuition, housing and fees. Every scholar gets a faculty or staff mentor for the whole undergraduate career. Each mentor advises a small group, meeting them together once a month on top of one-on-one sessions. The whole cohort gathers several times a year, for faculty dinners and a Boston cultural outing among other events. Laura Johnson, senior assistant provost for undergraduate affairs, and Anne Corriveau, director of international admissions, oversee the rollout.
Why BU joined
In her admission request to Davis UWC, Gilliam wrote that global engagement is “a key element of BU’s DNA.” She had seen Davis Scholars at the University of Chicago, where she held earlier roles, and wrote of their “talent, maturity, and global awareness.”
Kelly Walter, BU associate vice president for enrollment and dean of admissions, called the scholarships “an extraordinary complement” to BU’s aim of making a world-class education accessible to talented students worldwide. “What distinguishes the Davis Program is that it is about much more than financial support,” he said.
Two scholars
Geverk is the daughter of a Kurdish Iranian engineer and a Norwegian teacher. She grew up in an immigrant neighborhood of Moss, later served on Norway’s arm of the European Youth Parliament, and attended a UWC high school in the Netherlands. Her roommates there came from Ukraine, China, Oman, Georgia and Bhutan. “I’ve kind of lived between cultures,” she says. Without the scholarship, she says, she would probably have gone home for university or to another Scandinavian country where tuition is lower. She plans a career in business and is eyeing Innovate@BU and Questrom’s Entrepreneurship Club.
The second scholar, Silja, asked that her last name be withheld for privacy. At her Finnish high school she co-led a “Human Library,” a periodic evening where students told personal and global stories. The library was decked out with warm lights, pillows and candles. She is now looking at how to start something similar at BU, possibly using social media to reach busy students. A double major in business and international relations, Silja says Davis lets the UWC community “extend beyond UWC itself.” She adds: “I’m still very new to BU, so I’m trying to leave room to discover things I might not have expected to be interested in.”
