The Trebuchet Academy
The Program
The Trebuchet Academy provides a forum for early-career researchers and young professionals to pursue burning questions and challenge assumptions in an intimate, supportive, global, and collaborative environment. Modeled after the Synaptic Scholars, NIMEP, and various SaiU cohorts — out of which came Discourse, NIMEP Insights, Zeitgeist, respectively — the program provides the focus, connectivity, eclecticism, and mentorship for fellows to critically explore and engage deeply with self-chosen or solicited topics. Fellows are paired with senior practitioners from the Convisero network and beyond — matched by Sherman Teichman and others (e.g. Bonnie Kramer) — who has direct experience with a fellow's selected topic, forming a close advising relationship to mentor individual parts of a collective capstone project.
Fellows meet virtually weekly and engage frequently to create community, report findings, challenge each other from their eclectic international and professional experiences, and enjoy each others’ company. Fellows and mentors meet in conversation on a regular basis Organized virtual coffee chats with Convisero mentors are scheduled more broadly for insight into career development and increased connectivity. Fellows produce a journal (or some other chosen capstone initiative)(AND POLICY SUGGESTION?) to offer up their findings for a broader Trebuchet audience to criticism and appreciation of their thinking. Eventually, fellows are meant to enter as mentors themselves.
The Mentor-Match Process
Within the inaugural cohort, Global Affairs Fellows of high intellectual capacity and curiosity were sought out by Zach Braiker via Handshake; others were found through the existing Convisero network. Sherman validated the initial chosen candidates (in subsequent years, the community at large will be responsible for reviewing and accepting applications). Each was granted the freedom to select any topic of interest and an accompanying guiding research question. Prospective mentors from Convisero and adjacent networks were sent overtures by the fellows and were granted the liberty to accept or decline the relationship — dependent on availability and alignment of interest. This is one selection model. In future cohorts, Convisero mentors will also be asked where a mentee is needed, and fellows will be matched a posteriori.
Mission
The Trebuchet Academy exists to deliver an institutionally-uncensored intergenerational transfer of knowledge. Exposure to experience comes as fellows are given the guided opportunity to confront and reflect on vexing dilemmas that might have been daunting, even unapproachable, without the support of a community. The thesis is that the world’s most perplexing issues are not problems easily reconciled. A solution is not expected by our fellows, but what is wished for them is the process of tackling an issue they are passionate about. Outcomes might only be serendipitous, but the honest effort to struggle with these things will yield insight in mitigation.
“Insight, a breakthrough, requiring much intellectual dismantling and dislocation. Beginning with a mental interim, with the cultivation of a feeling for the unfamiliar, unparalleled, and incredible. It is being involved with a phenomenon, being intimately engaged to it, courting it, as it were, that after much perplexity and embarrassment, we come upon insight – upon a way of seeing the phenomenon from within. Insight is accompanied by a sense of surprise. What has been closed is suddenly disclosed. It entails genuine perception, seeing anew. He who thinks that we can see the same object twice has never seen. Paradoxically, insight is knowledge at first sight.” – Leviathan: A Journal of Middle East Politics and Culture