By Anita Deeg-Carlin
Global Engagement Minor and international student Tamiraa Sanjaajav ’27 was recently celebrated in The Wesleyan Connection for the work she’s been doing back home in Mongolia to encourage expression and communication skills among underprivileged youth. By way of the 2024-2025 Student Political Engagement Fund, granted through the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life and the Jewett Center for Community Partnerships, Sanjaajav founded the Nomadvocate Youth Civic Writing Lab to help develop writing skills and self-advocary amongst underprivileged youth leaders in Mongolia. In her workshops, via zoom, she can reach hundreds of students with her skill-building writing and discussion workshops.
Meanwhile, her work has also been exciting to us here on campus – she is simultaneously busy inspiring fellow Global Engagement Minors. Sanjaajav joined GEM’s Peer Entrepreneur Partners community last fall – peer entrepreneurs like Sanjaajav (and Lois Amponsah ’27) volunteer every year to partner with small groups of students in the minor’s gateway course, CGST 205 Introduction to Global Engagement. By partnering with peers who have lived experience pursuing shared interests in another culture, globally minded students can explore their academic and professional interests from a new lens and discover systems that perpetuate similar challenges around the world. Liz Ramirez, for example, who shares Sanjaajav’s interest in education, learned about gaps Mongolian students face in critical thinking pedagogy as well as systems that create inequality in rural/urban access to quality education. .
Wes’s rich intercultural diversity can take root and inform our community through innovative students like Sanjaajav. The Global Engagement Minor community (or “GEMosphere”) is so grateful, and happy to tap in!