🗽Recently, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Youth and Government (YAG) conference.
So, what is YAG?
- It’s a club at our school where we create different bills (law projects). Throughout this post, I’ll use the English word bill, since that’s how everyone here calls it.
🗽At the conference, we presented these bills together with students from all over the state. It was held in the state capital, Albany, inside the Capitol (basically like our Duma), and it lasted for three days. During this time, we listened to over 50 different bills on all sorts of topics. After a bill was read, we (the students) voted “yes” or “no” on whether it should move forward to the Senate.
🗽If a bill also passed in the Senate, it was considered successful, and the organizers could then present it to the state government. So yes—teenagers actually had a small influence on the legislative process!
🗽As a Russian student, some bills seemed really strange to me, especially when they moved forward. For example:
- legalization of marijuana
- permission for workers to protest without consequences
- legalization of prostitution
🗽But there were also great bills that passed, like:
- keeping lottery winners’ names private
- government funding for cancer treatment
- government funding for people with disabilities
🗽This kind of conference is perfect for anyone who loves debates. A week before the event, my friend and I started reading through other students’ bills, writing down questions, and preparing arguments for and against, so that during the debates we could actually join the discussions instead of just sitting quietly.
🗽Our bill presentation team had four exchange students: a guy from Zimbabwe, a girl from Spain, and two girls from Russia.
🗽I’ve always been a little bit of a politics fan, but after this event, my perspective definitely changed.
Would you like to try this experience yourself and become an exchange student?