By Nelson Graves

They love to travel, speak multiple languages, do community service outside of school and often aim for international careers.

They are News-Decoder’s student ambassadors.

Today we are announcing the lineup of students who serve as crucial bridges between News-Decoder and the academic institutions in our program. They help promote our work on campus, strengthen student and faculty engagement and extend our global network.

Who are they?

As you peruse their backgrounds and interests, you will see common strands: a love of writing and reading yet wide-ranging academic interests; mountains of volunteer work and a keen interest in social justice; athletes and musicians; plenty of dual nationals who have been uprooted time and again.

Little wonder that many of them want to pursue international careers — a natural fit with News-Decoder, which is trying to build a borderless global community of young people.

All but two are young women.

Take Gracyn Sollman, who is in her final year at Greens Farms Academy in Connecticut. She enjoys subjects as varied as the Humanities and Biology, is co-chair of the school’s Model United Nations club and senior-most editor of the schools’ literary publication.

This past summer, she studied sustainable development and social entrepreneurship at Yale with the Young Global Scholars program.

Likewise Hala Almomani, a third-year student at King’s Academy in Jordan, who also participates in Model UN conferences and writes for her school’s newspaper and literary magazine. She has lived in America and Jordan, and speaks Arabic and English fluently.

Katie-Ann Wilson is a master’s student in International Political Economy at King’s College London. A British citizen, she has lived and worked in Israel and Greece as a grant writer, securing European Union grants for the Arab Media Center, I’lam, and working remotely with Oxford Research Group. She has also worked as a pre-publisher for openDemocracy.

Danielle Franger is in her final year at La Jolla Country Day School in California, but she already knows she wants one day to work as a Medical Correspondent for an international news organization.

All but two of the ambassadors are young women — a sign of the future? In fact, students from two of our founding member institutions, Miss Porter’s School and Westover School, both in Connecticut, will be examining the state of women’s rights around the world in a News-Decoder webinar early next year.

Cody Thompson, a third-year undergraduate student at Indiana University, is one of the two young men in the lineup. Like several other ambassadors, he is interested in journalism and eventually wants to be a foreign correspondent so he can meet his goal “to travel to faraway places and to tell the stories that would otherwise go unheard.”

He’s a natural fit for News-Decoder, whose correspondents have lived around the world and in their more than 1,000 years of service covered many of the world’s biggest news story over the past four decades.