Student Leadership Abroad: Russia
Kelly Hook discusses her experiences traveling to Russia along with fifteen other student body presidents. She describes the goals of her trip abroad and how she helped co-found a non-profit organization upon her return to help further benefit/explore US-Russian relations.
Interview on 2012-05-02 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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Russia, [Laughs] that was a unique opportunity.
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I'm so glad I had that opportunity to go to Russia.
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You know those emails that you see nowadays that come over and they're like kind of jumbled up and they say, hey, can you wire me some money, I'm stuck-.
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I mean that's kind of the email that I got that said you've been selected to travel to Moscow, Russia and represent the United States.
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It kind of looked like that. It wasn't very official and I was like, this is a weird scam message
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but the only reason that I didn't dismiss it is because Matt Peterson, our university lobbyist,
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he also sent me a side email and said, "Just so you know, I submitted your name to the Congress in DC
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as a good leader on our campus and as a potential candidate for this US-Russia relations movement that we're doing."
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I learned later that the idea is that Russia and the United States has a Cold War plague around us.
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Generations that lived through the Cold War are now the ones educating students
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and they are the ones making decisions,
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and there is a movement going on that started with Obama, US-Russia relations as well as leadership in Russia,
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to try to get the future generations to overcome those ingrained stereotypes.
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So in a nutshell that's what this trip was about,
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and we got to go over there, the fifteen of us-all paid for by Russia, so a little bit of bias there,
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Russia's paying-but we go over there and we're shown the good life and the bad life of Russia
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and we are meeting with people who are extremely high up in the government.
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I would never get meetings similar here in a million years, not even close.
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It was a huge opportunity for us.
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We didn't even really know what we were doing there until we got there
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and we were handed basically this itinerary and when we saw who we were meeting with, which we did not know about before going over there, we were shocked.
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We had these frank discussions with Russian leaders and Russian CEOs
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about the future of Russia and they saw us as the upcoming leaders of America,
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probably because of some search that showed Bill Clinton or a few other people had been student body presidents,
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so they saw us as these leaders and they wanted us to believe in Russia as a potential partner
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and one day possibly invest in Russia with a business, with an idea, with a partnership, you name it.
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On our side we wanted to-.
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I mean we wanted to meet students, and we did when we went over there,
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and then from that experience we really wanted to bridge that gap ourselves.
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I mean I knew nothing about Russia going over there
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and I came back wanting to better the relationships because we met with students that were in schools over there,
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spoke great English. We went out with them and had some drinks and some dinner
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and the rapport that we had was amazing
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I virtually had no opinion but kind of a negative feeling going to Russia and I came back with a little bit of skepticism still,
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of course, but with the desire to see it change.
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I ended up being selected to go back, just me and three others from that trip,
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to go to St. Petersburg just two months later for a Russian economic forum,
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I am excited to continue building on that relationship.
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I've actually been a cofounder of an organization called CAREEL [The Center for American-Russian Engagement of Emerging Leaders], C-A-R-E-E-L, at CAREEL.org.
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It's now a 501c3 nonprofit
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and it works on developing exchange programs on not just Russia's side but US sides
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and keeping the communication going, now having students that are not just student body presidents
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but students in engineering, sciences, all of those things, I mean just to open up your mind to these experiences
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and meet these Russian youths who are awesome and every bit as similar to us as we are to them.
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We want to facilitate that, so CAREEL has started mainly from a guy named Richard and another guy named Cooper,
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they're the main ones, but twelve other of us from that fifteen[-person] trip have cofounded that organization,
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and it's been an interesting ride and I look forward to
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being involved in Russia politics in the future, which is a crazy thing. I never would have thought that would happen.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
