The GDS Policy Institute is preparing for its 11th edition in the summer of 2025, and non-GDS students will be able to participate for the first time.
Next year, the institute will be open to non-GDS students from all over the country. According to Leigh Tate, the director of community engagement and experiential learning, the institute will include more than the five tracks it offered in summer 2024 because of the expected rise in applicants.
The Policy Institute is a four-week summer program where GDS faculty and staff lead small courses, known as tracks, on social justice issues. Students spend time in classrooms learning about their issue, hearing from speakers and meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Applications for non-GDS students will be evaluated in the same way as applications from GDS students.
GDS history teacher and Waging Life track lead Topher Dunne said he hopes that the groups won’t get bigger: “It would probably make sense to add capacity in tracks rather than make each track bigger because the size of the group really mattered.” Dunne said he hopes accepting students from other schools will not reduce the number of students from GDS.
Tait said that the 2025 tracks will be determined in the coming months “because we want to make sure that we’re marketing the program to GDS students and non-GDS students with a complete list of tracks.” Tait noted the application period will open for everyone at the same time.
Tait said she didn’t know if fewer GDS students will be able to participate in the 2025 Institute. “As things currently stand, we can’t accept all GDS kids every year. We always have to turn some students away, so I imagine that it will be the same this year, but I can’t say for sure if it will be the same proportion as usual or not,” Tait said.
“I have a feeling that in these initial years it is still going to be very GDS-centric,” Dunne said. He pointed to the challenge of getting non-GDS students to apply to the institute.
According to Leigh Tait, the director of community engagement and experiential learning, the institute admissions process consists of short essays about applicants’ preferred tracks.
Admissions are determined by a blind read of the applications. “It’s really the students’ ideas and perspectives that are informing their admission into the program,” Tait said. “We’ve always been super clear that it’s not who’s the best writer; it’s who demonstrates that they really care about this and has a unique perspective to offer.”
Tait told the Bit that she has been marketing the institute to other schools. “We know that there are some schools who have a shared something with us, whether that be Jackson-Reed, who shares our neighborhood, or other schools that have a similar mission statement, where I think it would be an easy transition,” she said.
Nathan Tureck, a sophomore who participated in the 2024 institute, said, “I think it’s interesting adding other schools, but if it makes it too much harder for GDS kids to be able to do it, it takes away the GDS aspect,” he said. “But you will get to meet a lot of new people and hear different people’s opinions, so that’ll be fun.”
Tait added that she would be open to teachers from outside of GDS leading tracks at the Policy Institute, but that it will not happen this year, and there is no concrete plan for how this would happen.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article named Nathan Ginsberg as the member of the waging life track interviewed. Rather than Ginsberg, the correct person is Nathan Tureck.