Montgomery Catholic's Ravelo Spends the Summer at Duke

Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School Senior Guillermo Ravelo attended The Futures Institute: Shaping Tomorrow Now at Duke University for two weeks over the summer. Guillermo was challenged to develop the critical skill set of Futures Thinking and to apply that skill set to his personal development, academic direction, and life goals. The Duke TIPS program allows students to discover emerging trends in sustainability, nanotechnology, urbanization, biotechnology, medicine, artificial intelligence, robotics, brain science, and digital communication, create working strategies and bold responses to real world questions, helping to establish global transformation and solve planetary dilemmas, develop critical thinking that puts you on the cutting edge of social change and human development and helps develop a deeper understanding of the driving forces that are producing a rapidly expanding, volatile, and increasingly complex future.

A major focus of the course was to help students to recognize patterns, systems, emerging issues, and weak signals of change across social, economic, environmental, technological, and political domains. The week ended in team projects that explored innovations that were designed to be of benefit to future residents of megacities in emerging economies. According to his evaluation, Ravelo had a "meticulous eye for detail, intellectual curiosity and analytical skills"  that added to the course. "Guillermo lived up to the very high standards that are set for the students at the Futures Institute. He is clearly an astute observer of the world around him. His desire to learn and his intellectual focus will aid him in whatever he decides to pursue."

Guillermo is a member of the Loretto Chapter of Nation Honor Society at Montgomery Catholic, and the son of Marta and Cesar Ravelo of Montgomery, Ala.