Student Fellowships, Scholarships, Awards, and Prizes Watson Fellowship Wilmary Rodríguez ’18 is one of 40 students in the nation to be awarded a 2018–19 Watson Fellowship. As a Watson Fellow, Rodríguez will receive $30,000 for a “year of independent, purposeful exploration and travel outside of the United States.” She will visit Singapore, South Africa, India, and Costa Rica, where she plans to “engage with children, families, and communities in the foster care system in order to explore how storytelling affects these systems and how these systems, in turn, influence peoples’ stories.”
Evan Tims ’19 photo Mána Taylor Hjörleifsdóttir
Wilmary Rodríguez ’18 photo Lexi Parra ’18
Davis Prize Alexis Parra ’18 won a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace prize. The award will support her work this summer in Venezuela with a local arts collective, where she will implement her project “Truth in Image Making: Empowering Caracas’ Youth through the Art of Photography.” Fulbright Awards Among the students who have received Fulbright Scholarships are Page Benoit ’18, who will work as an English teaching assistant and facilitate direct exchanges between school children in America and Georgia; Maddie Breshears ’18, who will spend the year at Trinity College Dublin, where she will continue her Senior Project research on nanomaterials; Adelina Colaku ’18, who will research Islamic radicalization in Kosovo and volunteer with student newspapers in public high schools; Nicola Koepnick ’18, who will teach English and study textile traditions in Malaysia; Elena LeFevre ’18, who will spend the 2018–19 academic year in Argentina teaching English and volunteering with a women’s rights NGO; and Bethany Zulick ’16, who will be a Fulbright English teaching assistant in Germany. Critical Language Scholarships The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) program provides recipients with intensive foreign language study in 14 languages at sites worldwide. These eight-week programs are fully funded, including the costs of tuition, visas, airfare, home stays, and cultural enrichment/excursions. For the 2018 summer session, Evan Tims ’19, written arts and human rights major, was awarded a CLS for the study of Bangla at the American Institute of Indian Studies in Kolkata, India. Adelina Colaku ’18, who is majoring in economics and political studies, will study Turkish at the Azerbaijan University of Languages in Baku, Azerbaijan, after which she will be a Fulbright scholar in Kosovo.
Adelina Colaku ’18
Alexis Parra ’18
Saúl García Amezcua ’19 photo Summer-Grace Flemister ’19
Page Benoit ’18 photo Nora Levine
Corrina Gross ’19 photo Robert Gross
Maddie Breshears ’18
Lily Zacharias ’19
Elena LeFevre ’18
Gilman Scholarship Saúl García Amezcua ’19, joint major in political studies and human rights, won a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship to study abroad at Bard College Berlin this semester. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Gilman scholarship aims to diversify the students who study abroad and the countries and regions where they go. The late Rep. Gilman (R– N.Y.), who retired in 2002 after serving in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chairing the House Committee on International Relations, felt that study abroad encourages students to be contributors rather than spectators in the international community. Freeman Award Corrina Gross ’19, an Asian studies major with concentrations in Chinese and Japanese, won a Freeman Award for Study in Asia (FreemanASIA). She is spending three months pursuing her studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. The Freeman-ASIA program is designed to support U.S.-based undergraduates with demonstrated financial need who are planning to study abroad in East or Southeast Asia. The program’s goal is to increase the number of U.S. citizens and permanent residents with firsthand exposure to and understanding of Asia and its peoples and cultures. Award recipients are required to share their experiences with their home campuses to encourage study abroad by others and fulfill the program’s goal of increasing understanding of Asia in the United States. Carnegie Essay Contest The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs announced Lily Zacharias ’19 as a winner of the prestigious 2017 International Student /Teacher Essay Contest in the undergraduate category for her essay “Artificial Intelligence’s Ethical Challenges.” This year’s essay question was: In your opinion, what is the greatest ethical challenge facing the world today? Zacharias, who is majoring in political studies with a concentration in gender and sexuality studies, argued that we should be concerned about the myriad of new, complex, and challenging ethical issues being posed by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. She is a research assistant for Bard Assistant Professor of Political Studies Michelle Murray and has previously worked as a research assistant and development associate at the World Policy Institute.
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