At our first Morning Program of the year in New York City, a gleaming, golden Oscar award was passed around the room. That Oscar represented one gap year’s work: not one of our Scholars (not yet anyway!), but one year of the life of Michael Arndt. After listening to Arndt speak on the risks he’d taken in his career, our Scholars left wondering…what if their gap year became an Oscar?

The tale of Michael’s gap year was this: he had always wanted to be a screenwriter and director, but for most of his adult life, he had been a script reader for Hollywood. He figured he would learn many lessons about screenwriting from reading scripts, but the main one was this: there were countless bad, derivative scripts being written by people who wanted to make it more than they wanted to write something from the heart. He vowed to never write scripts as bad as the ones he’d been reading.

After years of toiling away like this, he decided he’d had enough: it was time for him to write his own script. He’d saved up enough money, he figured, to take a year away from work to pursue his passion. So he did. One year later, he’d produced 6 scripts, one of which went on to become the award-winning Little Miss Sunshine.

He himself believed Sunshine was risky: it didn’t fit into the Hollywood mold. There were no superheroes, no gunslingers, and it wasn’t a romantic comedy with leads that looked like Hollywood stars. It was a movie about a regular American family with a VW van that won't start taking their daughter to a beauty contest she has qualified for against all odds. It was not a film about finding traditional success but about love: and for that reason, Arndt believed the film wouldn’t sell. Nonetheless, he completed it and sold it. Why? He knew he had made something that would reach people's hearts if someone would take a chance on the script. Not long after, it was winning numerous awards for Best Screenplay and is many people’s favorite film to this day.

His main piece of advice? Find your pirate ship. What does that mean? It means disavowing what one feels they ought to do and finding what they are meant to do. It means seeking out like-minded people who share the same exceptional vision, who are willing to take risks because they believe. It means setting sail, not unlike Baret’s namesake Jeanne Baret, on a journey that others wouldn’t dare to take.

Our Scholars have an entire year with Baret to dream, to ideate, to try new things, to pursue their calling. People like Michael Arndt are proof not only that it is possible to follow your dreams but that doing so provides a sense of fulfillment. Our Scholars joined Baret because they wanted to step off the beaten path and blaze their own trail.

Inspired by their year with Baret, already our graduates are making their own businesses, doing their own research and making their own films, often alongside the very people they met through Baret. Already members of our new cohort inspired by Arndt have been to New Orleans and shot their own documentary with Baret Fellow Ronan MacRory. They have their pirate ship: that’s Baret. Now it is time to find their calling.