Monash University student Paris Karakousis is one of 37 Australians to have been offered an Asian Exchange Scholarship from Westpac, providing her an experience in one of Asia’s top innovation hubs.
Karakousis is driven to make her family proud by harnessing the privilege she has in being able to explore destinations her grandparents wouldn’t have dreamed of visiting, and making the world a better place along the way.
She’ll be headed to Seoul National University in South Korea to help deepen her understanding of Australia’s relationship with Asia with the aim to create a more sustainable future.
“I’m so happy about it, I’m honestly still in shock,” she told Neos Kosmos.
“I’m going to be doing some law subjects and also some international relations subjects, and alongside that, I’m also going to do a language intensive programme because I want to learn Korean.
“And because I got the scholarship, I can actually afford to do that language thing because it costs quite a bit of money, so I’m really happy that I can actually do it.”
But this won’t be Karakousis’s first rodeo in Asia.
In her first year of her Laws (Honours) and Global Studies degree, she travelled to Malaysia for a government funded climate mitigation immersion program.
“They took us on tours of Kuala Lumpur and also Penang Island and we focused on ecotourism and how Malaysia is trying to change the way that they run the country so that it’s more sustainable into the future because they have a lot of fragile ecosystems there,” she said.
“We got to do some really cool tours, like we went to a sanctuary for monkeys, which was really cool, and we got to learn about how they’re trying to conserve these monkey species.”
This inspired Karakousis to participate in further initiatives, including a Jakarta flood warning project, and volunteering with Educating The Future here in Australia, who help build preschools in Timor-Leste.
Making the most of what you’ve got
On inspiration, Karakousis points to family as her biggest reason to why she’s taken this path.
“Mostly inspired by my mum especially. She’s always been a bit of a progressive person and when I was younger I used to go to all those student climate change strikes and all that stuff because I think it’s like really important,” she said.
“A big issue for the future, especially for my generation. I’m born in 2003, and as I’ve grown up, it’s become more and more of a pressing issue – climate change.
“The world’s going to change a lot, very quickly. I’m really passionate about finding solutions to that issue.”
She also credits her yiayia with inspiring her to make the world a better place, someone who came to Australia in the ’60s living in extreme poverty back in Greece.
“She’s told me stories about how in the in the chorió (village) there was literally nothing except for some huts. They used to sleep in a hut and in a cave in the mountains is what she told me,” Karakousis said.
“She really didn’t have much growing up. Her dad passed away in the war as well, so she as the oldest daughter, was raising all her siblings as well.
“She’s lived a really hard life and I just really want to make her proud of me.”
She added that her yiayia is illiterate, never went to school, so she wants to make the most of her education.
“I want to make the most of it and travel around… my yiayia never got to do any of those things. So I want to show it all to her.
“She’s always very excited for me whenever I get to go overseas.”
Karakousis is deeply connected to her Greek roots, which originate in Crete, central Greece and Alistrati, which is 134km from Thessaloniki.
In fact, she went to Greece for the first time on a recent family Europe trip, visiting Athens as their last stop.
“I wanted to save the best for last. When the plane landed, I was crying. I have such a connection to Greece and I’ve never gotten to go.”
In the future, the young scholar hopes to move to Europe with Greece being an option of course.
She is actually in the process of trying to get her Greek citizenship and maybe one day would do some climate work there.
