
Meet Kayland Brown
Iceland 2024 – TGP Scholarship
Pennsylvania State University
Energy and Sustainability Policy
Graduation Year: 2025
“Iceland was exceptional: the people, the food, the land. It felt like a dream. Going here made me feel like I need to travel as much as I possibly can.”
About Kayland
My name is Kayland Brown and I study many topics related to environmental sciences and sustainability. I went to Belize before with TGP and I had the time of my life. Being around like minded individuals and collaborating to create a capstone was something I wanted to do at least one more time before graduating.
[When I was awarded a scholarship by The Green Program], I was very happy. I knew it brought me a huge step closer to being able to go. I was already receiving some financial assistance from my father and so this definitely eased that. The enrollment was pretty easy and straightforward.
Takeaways and Learning Moments
My expectations were that everything will be great and I would have a good time. I only felt this way because I went on a program before so I was confident that my time spent in Iceland would be enjoyable.
Its sad to think that many children and adults do not get to travel. The world is so massive, beautiful, and diverse. It should be enjoyed by all, no matter what race or class. My biggest takeaway was that no matter what I have seen on this planet, it just gets more and more beautiful. Iceland was exceptional: the people, the food, the land. It felt like a dream. Going here made me feel like I need to travel as much as I possibly can.
I really enjoyed being in a class room setting again. I have been doing online school for the past 5 years now and I have started to miss being in a classroom with a bunch of other students.

Capstone Project
My group came up with an educational program that would teach students that live in the underserved communities within Philadelphia about renewable energy and pollution. There were 3 different programs. One for elementary, middle, and high school students.
Elementary school students learned about visible pollution in water and the difficulties of getting microplastics. Middle school students would learn about carbon capture and sequestration as a naturally occurring process in trees. They would then have to estimate the amount of carbon being sequestered in a plot of land.
Lastly, High School students would partake in an after school program that allowed them to build ground mounted solar panels and the classes after the build would study renewables, measure input and output, clean the solar panels, and write a paper on solar panels efficiency compared to prior methods in their school.

Kayland’s advice for new GREENies:
Apply to as many scholarships as you can and look into if there are any courses with embedded study abroad programs.

To Those That Made My Scholarship Possible…
Thank you again TGP. This is the second time you have provided me with some funding to go on the trip. I truly did value everything I learned there. Thank you.