GLASS Scholars take a deep dive into the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals

NYU Tandon’s Global Leaders and Scholars in STEM (GLASS) program identifies high-achieving undergraduates with enormous potential and provides them with a variety of resources that allow them to grow academically, personally, and professionally. GLASS participants travel internationally in order to build global competency — one of the “5 GLASS Windows,” as the pillars of the program are known — but during those semesters when they are here studying in Brooklyn, the world comes to their doorstep.

That was the case during a recent visit from United Nations Economic Affairs Officer Shivani Nayyar, who had been invited to speak to a large cohort of GLASS scholars by Kat Arredondo , the Manager of Undergraduate Programs at Tandon, and her colleagues in the Office of Undergraduate Academics. Discussing the impetus behind the invitation, Arredondo  explained that each scholar has the opportunity to choose one of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to focus on during their time in the program, and that hearing directly from one of the economists involved in preparing the annual progress reports on the goals would be a worthwhile experience.  

As you would expect of Tandon students accepted into a selective and rigorous initiative like GLASS, they came prepared with unvarnished and insightful questions about the SDGs and how they can best be met.

Are the goals iterative and does the U.N. use AI modeling to track progress? Given that international collaboration is imperative, how is the U.N. incentivizing it? Is it even possible for developing countries to pay the debts accrued in the process of trying to meet some of the goals, which sometimes require costly infrastructure? Does the U.N. take into account social justice and fairness and what do those terms mean to the organization? What are our responsibilities, as the next generation of globally minded scientists and engineers?

Nayyar admitted to not having all the answers, but she affirmed that no one has a bigger stake in seeing the goals met than young people and emphasized that those responsibilities were pressing. While the U.N.'s 2024 report on SDG progress found that 95 percent of the world has mobile broadband access — one of the factors in Goal 9 (“Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation”) — that was a rare bright spot in a picture that showed that only 17 percent of the SDG targets are on track, nearly half are showing just minimal or moderate progress, and progress on over one-third has stalled or even regressed.

Another audience might have been daunted by those statistics, but GLASS Scholars know that they’ll have the power of a Tandon education behind them as they set off to help meet the 17 goals, using their engineering skills and ability to forge interdisciplinary collaborations in order to eradicate hunger and poverty, increase access to potable water and clean energy, conserve land and water resources, and other vital tasks.