Building the Transatlantic Generation - The Inaugural Joly Family Scholarship Gathering

On May 26, four students gathered in New York City for a day unlike any other in their academic lives. Dilan Cordoba, Lily Paltrowitz, Amandine Perret, and Apio Tunmer came as recipients of the Joly Family Scholarship – an award that recognizes outstanding students committed to making a positive difference in the world through purposeful leadership and transatlantic engagement. They left as the founding cohort of something new: Joly Fellows.

The inaugural Joly Family Scholarship Gathering was designed around a simple premise: that the most important lessons of a Sciences Po education cannot be found in a syllabus. They emerge in conversation — with a diplomat navigating great-power tensions, with an artist whose practice is inseparable from civic life, with a business leader who has spent decades asking what it means to lead with purpose. The day in New York brought all of these encounters together, offering scholars direct contact with people and questions that define lives of purposeful engagement.

The program moved between institutions and disciplines across New York City. At the Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations, scholars were welcomed for an intimate roundtable with Sciences Po Alumni Jay Dharmadhikari, Deputy Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations and Isis Jaraud-Darnault, Ministre conseillere / Political coordinator. Ranging across France, the United States, and the demands of global leadership, the exchange brought the transatlantic dimension of the scholarship to life in ways no classroom could replicate. A guided tour of the Polonsky Exhibition at the New York Public Library offered a different perspective: centuries of documents, maps, and manuscripts that have shaped the world and reminded the Fellows how long the project of human understanding has been underway.

What made the day distinctive was not any single encounter but the accumulated effect of moving between them. Diplomats, artists, executives, curators – no single career path, but a shared conviction that leadership takes many forms, and that the most durable kind is rooted in values rather than titles. Over lunch with Antoine Wagner, an American-French visual artist and Sciences Po alumnus, conversation ranged across creative practice, identity, and the relationship between art and civic purpose. In the afternoon, a session with Francis Hintermann, Global Managing Director of Accenture Research and former Sciences Po adjunct professor, moved between the technical and philosophical, asking the Fellows to think carefully about the values that guide those in positions of influence in a world being reshaped by artificial intelligence.

The most resilient bridges between France and the United States are built not by governments alone, but by people; by a generation of leaders with enough experience on both sides of the Atlantic to understand instinctively how the relationship matters. The Joly Fellows embody that same conviction. They are French students experiencing life at an American university, and American students discovering the intellectual traditions of France and Sciences Po. In both directions, the crossing changes them.

The day ended over dinner with Hubert Joly and Hortense le Gentil-Joly, where the scholars and their hosts returned to the questions that had surfaced all day: purpose, meaning, and what a career built around impact looks like in practice. The conversation moved across generations.

A Cohort. A Network. A Beginning.

At the end of the day, the scholars named something you can't really engineer: a sense of belonging to a group larger than any one of their own plans.

Sciences Po is more than a degree. It is a network of people who share a particular relationship to ideas and to public life, trained to think across disciplines, to take power seriously as a subject, and to feel some responsibility for the world they will help shape.

The Joly Family Scholarship exists to strengthen that network and to make the transatlantic side of a Sciences Po education central rather than incidental. The cohort will grow, alumni will return to mentor the scholars who follow, and the Fellows will carry their work to both sides of the Atlantic.

That is the longer arc. For now it is four scholars at one table, still turning over the questions they walked in with that morning.