My name is Anzer Ashraf, I am 16 years old and from Ponte Vedra, Florida. I am a student at Ponte Vedra High School with a passion for environmental sciences.

This past summer, to gain more knowledge in environmental sciences, I applied to summer enrichment programs at both Yale and Columbia Universities. I was fortunate to be accepted into both summer programs.

In June 2023, I started my summer at Yale for their two-week program. During my time, along with 150 other students, I attended their seminars, lectures, and final project assignments. We had one seminar per week, my first being on the topic of recycling and trash. Here we talked about the negative effects our garbage system has on our environment, we also researched several types of trash and how we could more effectively use or recycle them to limit the effects on the environment and more effectively use our resources. My second seminar was about food shortage and famine, here we discussed numerous countries who are going through a food shortage and why there is a food shortage despite having enough food for all 7 billion humans. The problem causing this was transportation. Due to the lack of transportation, we are not able to emit food to areas around the world effectively leaving us with the food shortage we are in today. Along with these seminars, we had lectures given to us by professors, most notably about the future of renewable energy in cities. The professor showed us the new technological ideas of how these energy sources would be implemented in the cities, one being using regular buildings themselves to host the energy sources! Our final part of the Yale program was researching and providing a solution for a problem for a real-world problem. I had a diverse group of individuals, one who was from Ukraine where we drew inspiration for our final project. Our research question was determining what the most effective renewable energy source is to implement on the bombed lands of Ukraine. We started with researching the land mass that was bombed and could be used to build infrastructure, then we chose 4 energy sources and determined the amount of energy they could generate meets the energy requirements and the national needs in those areas. We had chosen geothermal, nuclear, solar and wind as our energy sources and researched their feasibility, ending with nuclear being the most efficient energy source out of the four. Following the completion of my participation at the Yale program in New Haven, I returned home.