A New Year Begins

It's nearly the 260th anniversary of when Baret Scholars’ namesake, Jeanne Baret, boarded the ship Étoile on her way to becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.

This month, Baret’s third cohort, led by an accomplished Traveling Team, has begun their own journey around the globe in her intrepid spirit. From 28 different countries and almost every continent, these Scholars have made a bold choice to apply and join Baret. They have flocked to the foothills of New Hampshire for orientation. With the foliage beginning to turn, they’ve gotten to know each other and make plans for their year ahead.

They are an amazing group of young minds. Many of them have deferred their admissions to venerable institutions, like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Duke, Brown, Emerson, Barnard, and Colby, and others will be applying to university while they travel with Baret, with the help of our college advisor.

Helmed by Baret’s founder and Dean, Chris Whittle, as well as our Associate Deans, Ronan MacRory and Wendy Lin, Baret is led by an accomplished group we call Fellows. They are teachers, documentarians, scientists, expedition leaders and writers.

We have six returning members of our Traveling Team:

• Himraj Soin, a Fellow, has led expeditions all over the world with Ibex Expeditions and written for National Geographic, Vogue, and Reader’s Digest, among others.
• Tom Snow, a Fellow, an educator and Art Historian who holds a Master’s and PhD in History of Art from University College of London and has taught at UCL and Sotheby’s Institute of Art.
• Francisco Brottier, who doubles as a Fellow and a Medical Officer. A Professor of Human Anatomy, and later in Toxicology, he’s also worked as a volunteer doctor and as a part of rescue team in El Chalten.
• Julieta Pollari, our other Fellow doubling as a Medical Officer. She has been an Assistant Professor of Anatomy Department, and a travelling doctor accompanying camping trips for Martin Buber School.
• Luis Haddad, our videographer and photographer, has had a diverse career, earning a degree in Law and running his own digital marketing agency. His hard work and artistry allows us all to enjoy the Baret year vicariously.
• Weronika Brzezinska has worked in film and podcast production and has a master's degree in Film Aesthetics from the University of Oxford. She is Lead Producer of our Morning Program & Immersive Programming, organizing Baret's Side Quests and Scavenger Hunts.

And one new Fellow is setting sail, as it were, with Baret:

• Zani Wilson has worked as an Assistant Director of Admissions at NYU and will be a traveling college advisor for our Scholars. She also holds a masters degree in Interactive Media Arts and has studied abroad in Berlin, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and Jordan.

‍

Orientation is a time of joy: a time to make new friends from all over the world, as well as new plans for an unprecedented leap into the unknown. Our Scholars were educated on maintaining their emotional wellbeing, health and safety on the road, and have reviewed the ins and outs of the Baret year. They also availed themselves of the various opportunities for hiking, football, drawing, reflection, and bonfires that Eagle Mountain House offers. They've discussed plans for their end-of-year Capstone Project, learned about intercultural communication, talked through their excitement and nerves, and written a letter to themselves that they will open at the end of the year.

Our Scholars are already accomplished, graduating from prestigious schools like the United World Colleges, Rudolf Steiner School, Rosslyn Academy, African Leadership Academy, The Abbey School, A+ World Academy, The American Foundation School, and The Hewitt School. Among them are a Scholar who speaks 7 languages, winners of awards for entrepreneurship, an FIDE-rated chess player, Model Union Delegates, professional dancers, and several Duke of Edinburgh Award winners. And by the end of the year they will have done something none of them imagined was possible, seeing the world in all of its dazzling scope and depth.

Seven regions of the world, seven cosmopolitan cities, seven educational adventures:

New York City, São Paulo, Paris, Istanbul, Nairobi, Delhi, and Beijing will be their home bases. They will spend three weeks in each of these cities, more than enough time for these curious, adventurous young minds to become comfortable in each city.

But they’ll also journey through others like Washington DC, Buenos Aires, Shenzhen, and many more. And they will explore the Amazon, Patagonia, Mount Kenya, Madhya Pradesh, Watamu, the High Atlas Mountains, and Masai Mara, as well as various other diverse locales.

Their fellow Scholars will be their friends for life: when the year ends, they will have a friend in every corner of the globe who can show them their city. They will enter or reenter university having already produced a labor of love in the form of their Capstone Project. They will be more resilient, more independent, and more cosmopolitan-minded than their peers.

And they will be free, freer than they have ever been before.

This is, as Chris Whittle put it, one of the great lessons: "if you can experience that kind of freedom once, you can create it again at different times in your life." And this freedom is necessary for doing great things: without freedom, there is no invention, no innovation, no solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and no joy. In embracing freedom, our Scholars will not only become students of the world, but will discover the power to change it.

‍

If this sounds like the journey of a lifetime, access or begin your application!

‍

You can also read more about our journey on our blog. Be sure to follow us on Instagram as well.

For a more in-depth overview and complete catalogue of the Baret year, check out the Baret book.

‍