Arjun Akwei, a 2020 Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School graduate and Harvard student, was selected for the Schwarzman Scholars graduate program in November. The program will take the 21-year-old to Beijing, China to study foreign relations and explore the country for a year starting in August.
Schwarzman Scholars is a fully funded, one-year master’s degree program at Tsinghua University, the top-ranking university in Asia, according to Conor Newton, the associate of communications and marketing for the program.
The program is one of the most prestigious graduate fellowship programs in the world with only 150 scholars selected out of nearly 4,200 applicants – around 3% acceptance rate, Newton said.
The selection process begins with an initial application that is open to anyone between the ages of 18 and 29 with a bachelor’s degree, according to Newton. The application requires recommendation letters, transcripts as well as an essay and video component. From the initial pool of applicants, about 400 are selected for the interview round, which is led by business executives, non-profit leaders, and experts in their fields, Newton said. After the interview round, 150 scholars are chosen to the new cohort.
Upon learning he was accepted into the program, Akwei said it was a “heartwarming experience” that took him back to the days of college acceptances nearly four years ago.
“It was something that I had put a lot of time into and not something that I was really banking on, given that I know how selective and challenging these things tend to be. But it felt like the start of a new and very different adventure,” he said.
When he isn’t studying, Akwei is running the Harvard Undergraduate Think Tank, or researching China’s Belt and Road initiative (a massive infrastructure project launched in 2013 with the goal of connecting China to the rest of the world). Additionally, he works as the director of policy for Del. Joe Vogel’s (D-Dist. 17) congressional campaign.
“Our community should be proud to know Arjun is among only [57] Americans selected for this prestigious global program,” Vogel wrote in a text message. “I have deeply valued his work on my team. He is a true public servant who is passionately committed to serving for our state and country.”
Akwei is headed to Beijing next summer and said that he is looking forward to traveling around China and shadowing mayors of towns who are embracing climate-friendly development and leading the way in poverty alleviation.
He said that there is a lot to be learned from China in how the country has addressed climate change with climate-friendly cities and high-technology integration.
“These are things that I would love to see the United States do and if I can learn some of those lessons while I’m there and bring them back to the U.S. – ones that are able to be effectively integrated into our system – that would be a really special takeaway for me,” he said.
Akwei’s interest in international relations partially comes from his multicultural upbringing – his father is from Ghana, his mother is from Malaysia and other family members live in India – but also stems from a commitment to community service that began in Montgomery County, he said.
Akwei grew up in Chevy Chase and attended Chevy Chase Elementary School and Westland Middle School in Bethesda. He now studies government with a minor in astrophysics at Harvard.
In the future, he hopes to commit to a career in public service, focusing on foreign policy in China and India and potentially running for office at the local, state or national level, he said.
“Chevy Chase, Westland, B-CC were the places where I got involved in student government and sort of cultivated this interest in policy work,” he said. “And that connection to the community is still what drives me to work on, say, Joe’s congressional campaign and before that his state delegate campaign.”
Akwei has already spent some time living outside of the United States. As a child, he lived in India for three years and spent the summer between his sophomore and junior year in high school living with a host family in Beijing, he said.
Akwei also speaks Mandarin at a conversational level and hopes to improve his language skills during the year in China. He began taking Mandarin classes in middle school, he said.
Another experience that shaped his interest in foreign relations was a trip to Accra, the capital of Ghana, to visit family members. He described seeing Chinese construction sites around the city and being fascinated by the projects and what they meant for Ghana and the U.S. The trip later informed the research he conducted on the Belt and Road Initiative while spending the summer in Beijing. It also moved him to try and understand the relationship between China and Ghana to make it safer, productive and constructive for both sides, he said.
In this forthcoming experience as a Schwarzman Scholar, he sees a special opportunity to have a role in building a bridge between the U.S. and China, too.
“I think it is essential that we have leaders who are willing to move past a lot of the, I don’t know, platitudinal mistrust and general divisions that exist between the United States and China,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of preparation and policy and government now that’s preparing for a future of conflict and competition, but not a lot of preparation and thought going into how we build one of coexistence and cooperation.”
Akwei also sees the Schwarzman Scholars program as an opportunity to be a leader and re-envision what the U.S.-China dynamic could look like. He said that this mentality is “very much the future that we should be aspiring to.”
“To be a part of that kind of group who embraces the same mentality of we need to build bridges rather than deepen divisions seems like a really meaningful experience for what I hope to go on to do in the world,” Akwei said.