“When I was in 7th grade, I began to realize how terribly inefficient the public show system is. I would sit in mandatory classes, bored out of my mind due to the lack of difficulty,” said sophomore and entrepreneurship, international business & management major, Jasper Davis. He has been in approximately 15 organizations, learned to play seven instruments, became fluent in spanish, and still maintained a 4.0 GPA.
Davis’s passion for education led him to being a Pathways to Honors Mentor. He utilizes his personal experiences to educate students that the traditional school system isn’t necessarily the path that was meant for them.
“Before I came to UT, I spent hours and hours investigating the course catalog gaining a true understanding of how everything works,” Davis said. “I’m now able to transfer that expertise on to my mentees and help them achieve their exact educational and professional goals.”
On a heavily bulleted list of Davis’s active leadership roles is the Alternative Breaks Coordinator at the P.E.A.C.E. Volunteer Center as well as Chief-of-Staff and Founding Father of The Orti Oricellari Intellectual Circle (OOIC). The main goal of the OOIC is to encourage intellectual discussion with the younger generation where it can be seen as rare, according to the OOIC page on the UT website.
“Because of my extreme connectedness with many groups and organizations on campus, I am also able to connect my students with a plethora of event and group opportunities that a lot of people simply don’t know about,” Davis said.
In May, Davis went on an alternative summer break with students from P.E.A.C.E. Volunteer Center. The mission of the social service trip was to empower women through education. He saw a new way of life there, the value of education and a gender divide.
“There are certain jobs that women would do and watching girls pursue an education probably made a number of people uncomfortable at first.”
The young Peruvian women that Davis encountered didn’t have the luxury of driving to school. They commuted to college in taxis which lasted up to an hour. As Davis said, education in Peru
is a privilege and sometimes thought of as something only a male should pursue.
“The girls seeking a college education for the first time in all of the generations of their families had parents and grandparents that were beyond supportive,” Davis said. “I met the teary-eyed fathers and grandfathers of young female learners and was thanked profusely for helping their daughters achieve their dreams.”
Davis is also invested in environmental issues. He went to the Florida Keys Wild Bird Center to help with wildlife preservation and rehabilitation. He has been able to form some opinions about what needs to change in order to live well.
“The corporations with a vested interest and a lot of money (oil companies, for example) are able to easily keep governmental programs from encouraging alternative energies, subsidies for research and development of sustainable infrastructural improvements,” Jasper said. “A company shouldn’t be able to pay a fee and then continue dumping garbage into the earth, water, and air.”
Zoe Fowler can be reached at zoe.fowler@theminaretonline.com
Khadijah Khan can be reached at khadijah.khan@theminaretonline.com