Sophomore Anirudh Suri has been selected
as one of only 20 undergraduates from the United States and Canada to
be honored as a Goldman Sachs Global Leader. Anirudh joins 100 new Global
Leaders worldwide being honored for academic excellence and leadership
achievements by The
Goldman Sachs Foundation and its partner organization, the Institute
of International Education.
“The Global Leaders Program was created to identify, strengthen
and support a new generation of leaders capable of succeeding in a globally
and culturally interconnected world,” says Stephanie Bell-Rose,
President of The Goldman Sachs Foundation. “We need leaders who
can transcend national and cultural barriers to face global problems,
and we seek to help these remarkable young men and women become more
effective in their efforts to make a difference, both now and in the
future.”
A resident of New Delhi, India, Anirudh is a double major in economics
and political science (international relations focus) with a peace and
conflict studies concentration. An aspiring Foreign Service Officer
for his home country, he is a recipient of the prestigious Singapore
Airlines Youth Scholarship, as well as the Starr Foundation and Pannini
scholarships. He has held a variety of leadership positions in high
school as well as college, the most prominent of them being the captain
of Haverford’s debate and cricket teams, founder-president of
the International Students' Association, and co-chair of the Faculty-Student
Working Group on Planning of Conferences. He also serves on various
committees, including the steering committee for the Center for Peace
and Global Citizenship and the advisory committee for the Pendle Hill
Peace Forum. Fluent in English, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu, Anirudh spent
the summer of his freshman year in Kashmir, in an effort to understand
key aspects of the long-standing dispute between India and Pakistan.
He was the only undergraduate among South Asia experts at the Conference
on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin in October 2003, where
he presented an academic paper, and he is now organizing a unique student-initiated
conference on comparative study of conflict.
Each Global Leader receives a $3,000 grant for educational expenses.
Fifty Global Leaders, including 10 from U.S. and Canadian universities,
will be selected to participate in the annual Goldman Sachs Global Leadership
Institute July 11-15 in New York City. At the Institute they will spend
time with renowned leaders from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors,
learning about leadership and global issues. Past Institute speakers
have included experts in leadership from Goldman Sachs and The Leadership
Center at Morehouse College, and the Leader to Leader Institute, diplomats
from the United Nations, executives from Goldman Sachs and other companies,
and other leaders from all sectors.
Since the program’s creation in 2001, 400 students from more than
40 countries have been identified and honored as Goldman Sachs Global
Leaders. They have built an extensive network with each other and, with
modest seed funding from the program’s Social Entrepreneurship
Fund, have joined forces to launch innovative social ventures, including
a school in rural India, a water-purification system in Bangladesh,
scholarships for children orphaned by AIDS in Thailand, a micro-enterprise
initiative for women entrepreneurs in Macedonia, a Malaria prevention
campaign in Nigeria, a recycling program in Albania, and a meals program
for schoolchildren in Sri Lanka.
Allan Goodman, President and CEO of the Institute of International Education,
which for 85 years has fostered the international exchange of people
and ideas, says the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program addresses the
need to help develop young people who can lead across borders. “These
bright students know how to use rapid global communications and technology,”
says Goodman. “They have an understanding of other cultures. They
will succeed in whatever field they choose. Through the Global Leaders
Program, they will learn from each other and from program mentors in
diplomacy, business, academia, and the nonprofit sector to see that
solutions to the problems causing terrorism, disease, poverty, and other
pressing global issues often come best through international cooperation.”
