Fellowship Information

🌟 The Opportunity
đź‘‹ Our Approach
🚀  Your Year

We believe the year after high school shouldn’t be a "gap" but a launchpad to a life of purpose, meaning, and impact.

That's why we call it a "Launch Year."

Our Fellowship is designed to unlock the REAL skills (resilience, empathy, agency, and leadership) that can't be taught in a classroom.

What We Offer:

  • Global community of deep, diverse, and determined peers
  • Coaching and mentorship to support your well-being and growth, holding you accountable to your true self, not a final exam
  • Experiential curriculum that augments and enhances your self-directed learning
  • Relational technology to support the most productive and profound online engagement you've ever experienced
  • Inspiration from luminaries — people like Wendy Kopp (Teach for All), Premal Shah (Kiva), Andrew Youn (One Acre Fund), Jeremy Heimans (Purpose), Mia Birdsong (NextRiver), Jenny Odell (author), and many more
  • Leadership experience helping us design and build The Flight School’s future

What You'll Gain:

  • Clarity about yourself, your next steps and how to build a meaningful life
  • Courage to sustain you when things are hard (and when they’re not!)
  • An inner compass more trustworthy than other people’s maps or expectations
  • A body of work that reflects what you did and learned throughout your year
  • A lifelong network of peers and champions from across the globe

Our donors have covered your tuition so participation is free for selected Fellows. Additionally, Fellows are eligible to apply for a stipend of up to $10,000 USD to support travel, lodging, or projects during the year.

Overview

We believe there’s an education higher than higher ed — a whole-person approach to learning that helps you understand your gifts, explore what the world needs, and discover what role you’re here to play.

We’re looking for dreamers and do-ers worldwide who are ready to trade classrooms and textbooks for a radical new curriculum: life!

Learning Loop

Our four-step process is anchored in experiential pedagogy: real-world practice.

Core Curriculum

Fellows explore life’s big questions: Who am I? What does the world need? Where’s my role? How will I lead?

Through workshops, courses and coaching you’ll develop mastery in:

  • Attention
  • Intention
  • Gratitude
  • Curiosity
  • Connection
  • Empathy
  • Courage
  • Resilience
  • Humility
  • Wisdom
  • Meaning
  • Voice

Outcomes

We're helping our Fellows find their people, power, and purpose. This means you'll learn how to: build trustworthy social networks, develop agency and learn how to wield it wisely, and design a meaningful life.

Ultimately, we’re equipping wise and impactful leaders who:

  • Practice curiosity before judgment
  • Connect to build empathy
  • Cultivate courage to do hard things 
  • Champion equity and opportunity 
  • Align their life with their convictions 

The Fellowship will be demanding and dynamic, active, and (at times) unpredictable. It will also be the most intense and formative learning experience of your life.

While each Fellow determines their own path, everyone commits to these core experiences:

  • ‍Leave home: Spend time immersed in a place that feels foreign to you. Whether you’re in a new country or a new neighborhood, you’ll expand your perspective, and your comfort zone.
  • Do aligned work: Apprentice to a problem that animates you. This may be through paid work, an internship, or a passion project, but it needs to give you experience of doing work that aligns with your deepest curiosity.
  • Rest and retreat: Spend at least one week in quiet – whether in the wilderness, at a silent retreat or at a silent retreat – to unplug from technology and experience stillness.
  • Participate in the Flight School community: Actively contribute to our online community through weekly meet-ups and asynchronous challenges and reflection activities.   

Fellowship Timeline

📦 July: Preparation

  • Meet our network of near peers and mentors
  • Discern your animating question
  • Develop plans for the year (budget, logistics, etc.)

🧭 August: Dis/orientation

  • Participate in intensive, daily workshops
  • Bond with the cohort through structured (virtual) meetups

🌍 September - April: Learning in the World

  • Leave home to immerse in a foreign place
  • Do work aligned with an animating question
  • Reflect and integrate with our coaches and mentors

🤗 May: Synthesize and Share

  • Develop and present a capstone project to showcase what you’ve learned (e.g. TED talk, research, podcast, exhibition)
  • Pass the baton to incoming Fellows

🌱 June and Beyond: Lifelong Learning

  • Explore new ways to contribute to and learn from the community.

Our philosophy is that you never graduate from The Flight School. Our community will be yours for life, accompanying you as you move on and up in the world, charting (and changing) your course.

Credit: Martina Scott