60 If, as the saying goes, the periphery’s students can’t come to Bar-Ilan, Bar-Ilan is determined to go to the periphery. Especially if, as in the case of a new collaboration with Atidim, it means preparing bright and motivated young people for meaningful service to their country. Atidim (“Futures”) is a national organization that works to develop Israel’s human capital and close its socioeconomic gaps through educational opportunities. And now, through a collaboration with Bar-Ilan’s Faculty of Exact Sciences, it can grant disadvantaged young people with exceptional mathematics potential the advanced training required for top positions in the IDF’s Military Intelligence. Beginning last July, 18 high-school juniors from Israel’s geographic and socioeconomic periphery began a two-year course of online studies with faculty from the Department of Mathematics. When they graduate from high school, they’ll spend a third year studying full-time on campus, after which they’ll have earned a bachelor’s degree. Featuring full scholarships, fully subsidized accommodations in Bar-Ilan dorms, and three years of intensive summer school, the program “paves students’ path to the military’s technological units, themselves often steppingstones to careers in Israel’s high-tech industry,” says Dean of the Faculty Prof. Uzi Vishne. “As such, it’s a path to personal fulfillment and purposeful citizenship.” Raising the Periphery to the Power of Higher Ed The Atidim-IDF Mathematics Program Prof. Uzi Vishne Image generated by AI
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