Friends Of Young Minds (FOYM) is a non-profit registered student organization at Rice University. FOYM was founded in September 1996 with the initiative of Dipankar Sarkar, who graduated from Rice (May 1996) with a PhD in Applied Physics. He has since returned to India where, in addition to running his own business, he continues to work actively with FOYM in enabling the spread of education to young minds.
Currently, FOYM has two chapters, one in the U.S, at Rice University, and the other in India at Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The Rice chapter has a core group consisting of more than 20 Rice graduate students and a support group consisting of Rice alumni and members of Houston community. The Mumbai chapter of FOYM is at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) that has the involvement of more than 35 faculty members.
Third-world countries, where huge masses of population do not have access to reasonable educations, enter the new millennium terribly disadvantaged. Children of this and future generations will be handicapped by the sheer unavailability and inaccessibility of good educational tools unless serious, independent, work complements the programs instituted by local governments.
Motivating young children to pursue a course of education in such countries is the biggest challenge that needs to be faced. This is a very difficult task mainly because education does not seem to have an immediate impact or gain. A lot of these children enter the work force at a very early age because education's long term rewards are lost on them. One major goal of FOYM is to seek to project education as a reward in itself—as an entertaining, enjoyable, and intellectually stimulating excercise, which we like to refer to as fun education. In other words, our goal is to provide a stimulus to young minds so that they can be sufficiently motivated to pursue a course of education thereafter.
FOYM is committed to helping children from financially handicapped regions of the world. Members of FOYM deeply share the belief that the best gift one can give these children is the gift of education.
FOYM was founded in Septemeber 1996 to identify and implement strategies to enable these children to have access to fun education. FOYM's focus is towards the transfer of equipment and expertise so that children in such parts of the world would have a more fulfilling education. Our pilot project right now is in India and depending on the success and the lessons learnt from this project we envision establishing similar initiatives in other third world countries.
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