By Megha Poddar and Soven Bery, Editors-In-Chief

As we rushed out of school on that fateful day last June, most of us had bright hopes and dreams for the summer– vacation, beach, internships, what could possibly go wrong? It is a season that summons happy thoughts of well-deserved rest and relaxation, with Facebook and Instagram posts filled with images of travel and family time.

But not this summer. Instead, Facebook and Twitter feeds were filled with story after story about often heart-wrenching and divisive news events. It was a summer tainted by bloodshed, terrorism, racism, and death over ongoing events such as the shooting of Michael Brown and the Israel-Palestine conflict. It was a summer that forced us all to consider the harsh realities of the world we live in.

For us at The Minuteman, we found it hard to comprehend how much the world was changing, and, as it was, for the worse. Our first meeting of the year consisted mostly of anger and disappointment, as even some of our happier reports from the summer had irrefutable undertones of the tragic conflict occurring here in the United States and abroad, conflict that we simply do not have the power or means to resolve. But then we realized something– never before has our job as journalists meant so much to the Newark Academy community. Thousands of miles away, ISIS threatens and tortures western journalists and only hundreds of miles away, journalists are our only source of news on the developments in Ferguson.

Yet on a larger scale, never before has our role as a community, in understanding our place in this country and beyond, been so important as well. We call ourselves the “Global Academy” and this was shown on October 2 when Meghan Henshall visited the school, spoke on two occasions and sat down with the Editors of The Minuteman. Henshall is a Newark Academy graduate who spent the past two years working with the Peace Corps in Cambodia. When asked about how the citizens of this foreign country reacted to an American, Henshall stated that she was welcomed with open arms. She noted that in Cambodia, and many countries in Southeast Asia, white skin is considered incredibly beautiful and people with a lighter skin tone are received with much greater grace than those with darker skin. Henshall also told us that being fat is a good attribute to have in Cambodia and people would remark, “Oh, you look so fat” or “You look much fatter than you did yesterday.” These are compliments that would seem sarcastic or out of place in our society, which operates on a different set of beauty standards.

However, it is not just beauty standards that differ between cultures. Henshall was thrown into a foreign country with different gender distinctions and social norms. To a much larger extent, she was experiencing what almost every Newark Academy student goes through on the required Immersion Trips. That is just one of the many facets of the school that makes us a “Global Academy” and, while it is important to be a citizen of the world, it is equally as important to understand the cultures and conflicts of different people. As this summer has shown, turmoil exists at every corner of the globe and it is our job as journalists and young minds to grapple with it.