Starting on Friday, Columbia University will be hosting “United For Progress,” a three-day event with panels and speakers featuring leading Italian figures from the worlds of business, politics, and media. The gathering is organized by United Italian Societies, a student-led nonprofit uniting Italian student societies in different universities, representing over 11,000 students across eight countries, including 20 universities along the East Coast in the U.S. The event is the third part of the 2025 Italian Symposium, “a multi-city conference championing Italy on the world stage,” according to the UIS website, with previous events taking place in London and Madrid last month.
“United for Progress” is the result of the work and vision of Tobias Luciano Benetton, an Applied Mathematics and Physics student at Brown University, and Angelika Maria Lattanzio, a Management Science student at Yale University. Together they lead a team of fifteen students from universities such as Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Fordham, Brown and many others.
Among the group’s stated goals is to promote access to visas for short-term internships, foster the circulation of know-how through professional experiences, activate mentoring and tutoring programs to facilitate access to scholarships and international opportunities, and strengthen the network of dialogue between young people, institutions and businesses on both sides of the Atlantic.
“‘United for Progress’ aims to be a space for critical reflection and active participation for the younger generation,” the group says in a statement. “Young Italians abroad, immersed in global academic and professional contexts, today have the responsibility and opportunity to interrogate and help shape the paradigms that will define the world they will inhabit.”
