Global Poverty and Solutions- Introduction

7/12/09
Today was the first day of this summer's High School Studies Program (HSSP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. The course that I am taking in this program is called How to Change the World: Global Poverty and Solutions. Every Sunday morning until the end of August, I will be traveling two hours from my home to MIT, where I will meet with a group of students who share an interest in learning about and finding solutions to poverty throughout the world. For our first class, we discussed the basic idea of the course and learned some background information that helped us understand the state the world is in today. Much of this focused on the factors that have separated different regions in history in terms of poverty, as well as what nations have been wealthier in the past and which ones will be wealthier in the future. The class seems to be more based around discussion than around lectures, and we were encouraged to keep up with the news so that we could have more to discuss in the future.
So far I am really enjoying the program, and I believe that it is entirely worth the time and the amount of traveling it takes to get there. I feel like I have already learned much about poverty, and I am looking forward to hearing about some possible solutions to the problem.