AU's winners at the European Parliament. Photo by Javier Bernal Revert.  

They weren’t in it for the prize.

In fact, as the team of four American University students embarked on months of intense preparation for the Schuman Challenge, they didn’t even know there was one.

“We just wanted to win,” said James Bole, SIS/BA ’26. “Once we made it to the finals, we felt pretty confident that we were going to be able to pull out a win because it meant that they liked our project.”

The European Union delegation to the United States has since 2017 sponsored the academic competition, which pits teams against each other in a battle of dialogue around transatlantic issues.

“They’re getting to audition in front of extremely seasoned professionals,” said SIS Hurst senior professorial lecturer Garret Martin, who advised the team along with SIS professor Michelle Egan. “The judges are taking this seriously. They’re grilling them and asking probing questions. Students get an opportunity to engage in a field that’s hard if you’re starting your career. That’s why this competition is so important.”

In April, AU’s team—Tarumbidzwa Chirume, SIS/BA ’26; Arjun Mishra, CAS/BS, SPA/BA ’27; Isabella Long, CAS/BS ’25; and Bole—beat out 27 teams, including finalists from Columbia University and the University of Texas at Austin, to finish first for the second year in a row.

“It was incredibly rewarding to collaborate with students from diverse academic disciplines as we tackled some of the most pressing issues affecting the transatlantic relationship,” Long said. “Bringing a public health lens to global policy conversations allowed me to contribute a unique perspective to our team’s approach, and the experience deepened my appreciation for interdisciplinary problem-solving on complex international challenges.”

This year, the win came with an all-expenses-paid trip to Brussels, Belgium, courtesy of the EU. In June, the AU team traveled nearly 4,000 miles to meet with David O’Sullivan, EU sanctions envoy and former EU ambassador to the US, and present their idea to senior officials from the European External Action Service, European Commission, and European Parliament.

Photo by Michelle Egan.

The following day, the team also shared their proposal with the US Mission to the European Union.

“They were introduced to the Chargé d’Affaires,” Egan said. “He stayed the entire presentation. We not only had about 12 people in the room, including an AU student interning at the embassy, but someone from the State Department with expertise on China, someone from the Drug Enforcement Agency, and four more people on screen joining back in DC.”

The 2025 competition tasked teams with developing a proposal for a joint EU-US initiative vis-à-vis China using artificial intelligence as a key technology. AU’s winning proposal focused on monitoring illicit drug trafficking through AI-driven, cross-border mechanisms.

“The idea was to adopt a Chinese AI system and use that to track the export of Chinese precursor chemicals that can be used to track good drugs and bad drugs,” Egan said. “They really liked it because it’s feasible, but it was also politically salient.”

By the time they presented their proposal before key policymakers, the AU team wasn’t nervous. They’d practiced the presentation dozens of times. But the opportunity to turn a theoretical challenge into a real-world solution also wasn’t one they took lightly—or one they’ll soon forget.

“Young people at American University really can do a lot of really cool stuff,” Bole said. “I’d always wondered about all the opportunities that I might have in college, [but] I never would have dreamed that I would be flown to Belgium to present an idea that I had created with three of my friends in front of diplomats.”