A deal he struck with his parents has enabled recent University of Pennsylvania grad Zachary Levine to pursue his passion for conducting international relations on the Internet. Levine has spent the last three years as president of Dorm Room Diplomacy, a nonprofit that uses online videoconferences to foster mutual understanding between students in the West and Middle East.

The deal was this: complete senior year coursework to graduate a semester early and Levine’s parents would give him the money saved from spring semester tuition to help pay for graduate school. Levine lived up to his end of the bargain, earning a bachelor’s in political science. He will walk at Commencement this spring and in the fall will start grad school at the University of Oxford where he plans to continue his work as president of DRD.

Penn students founded DRD as a nonpartisan organization in 2009. As president, Levine oversees programs that utilize virtual exchanges to build relationships and bridge the cultural divide between college students in the United States and Middle East. The ultimate goal is to broaden perspectives to lay a foundation for a better future between these regions of the world.

Past DRD participants hail from more than 40 universities across the U.S. and Middle East. American universities include Penn, Harvard, Yale and Columbia and Middle Eastern ones include the University of Basrah in Iraq, American University of Afghanistan, Haigazian University in Lebanon and Koc University in Turkey. Levine plans to visit Koc this spring as part of his ongoing work as president. 

“We engage students from the U.S. and Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf in virtual exchanges, in other words, bringing traditional facilitated dialogues online, to broaden perspectives, foster relationships and build mutual understanding between students on both sides of the aisle,” Levine says. “Think of it as midway between a classic pen pal and a study-abroad friend.”

He first heard about DRD during New Student Orientation freshman year. An aunt had given him names of a couple students she knew who attended Penn and instructed him to look them up. He did. 

The upperclassmen he met, Jacob Bloomenfield Gantz and Corey Metzman, now alumni, were co-founders of DRD. They became his mentors and encouraged him to get involved with their initiative.

Levine was intrigued. He had attended Jewish Day School growing up and came to Penn interested in learning about Islam, Arab culture and Middle Eastern politics. So he participated in an early DRD videoconference.

“From my first videoconferencing experience with DRD, I sensed the organization had potential,” he says.

He was hooked and upped his involvement.

DRD’s approach is simple. A student flips open a laptop and clicks a link waiting in the email inbox. The link goes to a Google Hangout session for an hour of discussion with seven others: three U.S. college students, three Middle Eastern students in different countries and a facilitator, who is a master’s or Ph.D. student pursuing a degree in a relevant topic area and who also has past experience with moderated dialogue.

The first few weeks are spent running through a DRD original relationship-building curriculum. After the third or fourth week, participants talk about topics of interest. These usually include American foreign policy, religion and current events. Videoconferences are held weekly for 10 weeks each semester. Participants stay in the same groups over the course of a term.

Each week there’s a check-in where students talk about their week, something good that happened, a song they like or perhaps something their parents said that made them happy. Participants begin to see one another as college students like themselves and not as people in a distant foreign land to whom they can’t relate. 

One of those early videoconferences in which Levine participated occurred when a news story was attracting international attention. Malala Yousafzai was shot by Taliban gunmen for criticizing the ban on education for girls like herself in Pakistan. Remarkably, a participant in Levine’s videoconference was a Pakistani attending university in Turkey who knew Malala growing up. His insights were riveting.

For his work with DRD, Levine was named a 2014 Ariane de Rothschild Fellow. The AdR Fellowship develops a network of entrepreneurs and social leaders with a demonstrated interest in change and in cross-cultural dialogue. Levine joined the Fellows for an international program at Cambridge University for three weeks at the end of last summer. He was also named a 2014 AMENDS Fellow and spoke with DRD co-founder Corey Metzman at Stanford University last spring.

Levine looks forward to pursuing a master’s degree in social science of the Internet at Oxford and hopes to begin a chapters of DRD across Europe as part of the nonprofit’s strategic growth plan.

He envisions DRD broadening its mission to connect young leaders around the world by bringing videoconferences offline, a pivot the organization is soon to make. He wants to encourage more in-person meet-ups between participants, something he is doing during his upcoming trip to Turkey.

After he graduates from Oxford, Levine has a job lined up as a business analyst in Washington, D.C., starting in September 2016.