Where are they now? Ambassador Alum Tyler Baum

by Beth Dolinar

2013 Teen Ambassador, Tyler Baum

It may seem like a reach for an 18-year-old man to say he hopes to someday be elected to national political office, but then again, you don’t know Tyler Baum.

Tyler is a cyber-school senior from Lawrence, Pa, an ambitious and somewhat serious young man who has the academic chops to have been granted early acceptance to study geopolitical research at Dartmouth College. When he starts there next fall, he will already have had college experience on his resume; he has been taking classes at Duquesne University while finishing his high school diploma.

His political ambitions are heartfelt but relatively new. Before attending Luminari’s  “I Want to be an Ambassador” camp in summer 2013, Tyler was not sure what he wanted to do with his life—perhaps something in computer science. But the Luminari camp started him on a different path.

“That camp began my interest in politics,” said Tyler. “I really wasn’t all that interested before.”

As part of the camp, Tyler participated in the Mock United Nations, which presented the students with a theoretical crisis for them to solve.

“That made me realize it is great to work with others and compromise,” Tyler said. Later in the camp, the students travelled to Washington, D.C., where they had face-to-face meetings with ambassadors and diplomats.

“That was my first real experience of Washington politics,” he said. “Asking them questions made me more confident in public speaking and more comfortable with sharing my opinions.”

Now active in student government, Tyler says he can attribute his leadership skills directly to those 7 days at Ambassador camp.  The camp’s tradition is for each student to prepare and present a short speech during the closing ceremonies, an exercise Tyler says sparked his love of public speaking.

“It totally changed my comfort with public speaking,” he said.

As Tyler completes his senior year, he looks ahead to the many plans for his life. It is sure to be a big life, full of challenges and triumphs. Senator Baum, maybe? President?

He says as he moves forward, he will always remember those days when he first became a young ambassador.

“The camp really moved me into a new stage of maturity and leadership,” he said. “I can draw a line from where I am now directly back to the camp. I have the best memories.”

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Luminari Coordinator, Beth Dolinar brings her talents and experience as a writer, Emmy-award producer, public speaker and deadline driven multi-tasker to our team. She writes a popular column for the Washington "Observer-Reporter." She is a contributing producer of documentary length programming for WQED-TV on a wide range of topics and currently teaches as an adjunct faculty member at Robert Morris University. Beth has a son and a daughter. She is an avid yoga devotee, cyclist and reader. Beth says she types like lightning but reads slowly -- because she likes a really good sentence.