Multilingual senior eyes global impact

Ever since his childhood days, Jasper Schutt has had a deep interest in world affairs.

The accomplished Tar Heel grew up in San Francisco, where there’s a vibrant Chinese American community. Many of Schutt’s friends during that time were Chinese Americans, and Schutt took Mandarin classes in middle school to better connect with them and his city’s history.

“You can’t really understand or write the history of San Francisco without the history of Chinese Americans,” Schutt said. “Learning the language was just so electrifying in a way that when I had opportunities to learn other languages, I already knew the richness of what was in store for me.”

That love of language and learning foreign cultures has carried through to Schutt’s time at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Schutt ’25 is a Morehead-Cain scholar and Honors Carolina student majoring in global and interdisciplinary studies, with a minor in Chinese. He is fluent in Arabic, Russian and Mandarin, and he’s currently studying Russian in Almaty, Kazakhstan, as a Boren scholar.

After graduating from Carolina, Schutt will continue his studies at Beijing’s Tsinghua University as one of Carolina’s three Schwarzman scholarship recipients.

Check out these 10 things you need to know before attending UNC-Chapel Hill’s Spring Commencement.

Schutt is passionate about the global economy — particularly the hierarchies and power structures that impact developing countries. He’ll study international investment law at Tsinghua University with the goal of reforming treaties and laws in a way that will empower poor countries.

“What has driven my studies at Carolina is trying to connect with as many different people as possible, learn their languages and seek out the connections between my lived experience and theirs,” said Schutt. “At Tsinghua, I’m excited to be with an exceptionally diverse group of people from all around the world.”

During his time at Carolina — and in collaboration with Duke University — Schutt founded and captained the UNC Arabic Debate Team, leading the team into national competitions. Schutt has also served as a frequent contributor on BBC News Arabic and Al-Jazeera Arabic, where he’s discussed American politics and campus protests across the American South.

“I think the thing that I’m the most proud of having been involved in at Carolina was the Arabic debate team,” Schutt said. “I founded that with some people, and it’s still going strong, and it was just a great community for me in my time in Carolina.”

After learning more about America’s relations and attitudes toward the Middle East in high school, Schutt said he felt a personal responsibility as an American to learn Arabic and better understand the region. Thanks to funding from his Morehead-Cain scholarship, Schutt spent a gap year in Jordan before beginning his undergraduate studies, and he came away from the experience inspired by the connections he found in Arabic culture.

Throughout his travels, Schutt concentrated on the similarities between cultures instead of the differences, emboldening him to pursue a career focused on building a more just international economy.

“I want to represent developing countries and reform international laws that would give more power to developing countries in the global economy and allow them to regulate their own affairs,” Schutt said. “I want to play a role in both reforming those kind of treaties and laws and tip the scales a little bit toward poor countries and countries in the Global South.”