On Monday, Sept. 2, Upper School students trickled into Garland Theater to watch a presentation from the students who attended the 2024 travel programs offered by PolyGlobal (formerly named the Global Initiatives Program). The students presented pictures, highlights, and reflections from their trips to Costa Rica, South Africa, Cambodia, Taiwan, and Berlin, Germany.

PolyGlobal aims to create a compassionate global community through the interactive study of world cultures. Each year, its programs connect Poly students to people of other nations and cultures, with presentations on their travels to the Poly community being a consistent part of the PolyGlobal experience. However, according to PolyGlobal Director Rick Caragher, this assembly was the first in years to be held during the school day, rather than in the evening, enabling all the Upper School students and faculty to attend. Caragher said, “I believe that those selected for the travel program have a responsibility to share back with our community what [they] saw, heard, felt, experienced, encountered, thought, etc.”

Notable experiences shared during the assembly included studying nature and sustainability in Costa Rica, hiking and learning about apartheid in South Africa, learning about the use of rats in detecting Cambodian landmines, exploring the lively night food markets in Taiwan and visiting a Nazi concentration camp outside of Berlin.

Sophomore Danica Hua, who participated in the Berlin trip, stated, “I think that these GIP experiences are valuable learning opportunities, and what we learned from them and gained out of them can be shared with everyone else. These presentations can encourage other people to attend [future PolyGlobal] trips,” she said.

For the 2024-2025 school year, the PolyGlobal travel programs will visit Italy, Kazakhstan, and South Africa during spring break and Argentina and Japan at the start of summer. Interested applicants may check the PolyGlobal website in mid-September for more information.