Fellowship Recipients
Watson Fellowship
Confronting Entropy: Elder Care in an Aging World
Hometown: San Francisco
Major: biology and film and media studies
Interests: documentary film, rugby, nursing homes
Best Travel Experience: visiting distant relatives in La Marche, Italy.
What People Don't Know About Me: I always listen to music with my headphones on full volume.
Words to live by: If it's exciting and scary, you should probably do it.
Watson Fellowship
Independent travel and study in Brazil, Madagascar, Indonesia, Malaysia and Russia
Hometown: Seattle, Washington
Major: Biology-Environmental Studies
Interests: wildlife disease, geckos, collaborative survival with microbes, the Anthropocene extinction, Ultimate frisbee
Best travel experience: Bathing in streams everywhere I go, whether I'm sitting under a pounding waterfall in Brazil or pouring gold-flecked water over myself in Madagascar.
What people don't know about me: My spirit primate is the greater dwarf lemur because it cradles its nest in a tree fern.
Words to live by: "I've been watching stars rely on the darkness they resist." (Mark Nepo)
Core Fellows Program
Fellow in Public Affairs at FOCUS, St. Louis, Missouri
Hometown: Sacramento
Major: History
Interests: Running slowly and reading long form journalism
Best travel experience: Trying to find a train with friends in the Czech countryside while studying abroad.
What people don't know about me: I love listening to Top 40 in the car.
Words to live by: "Go to where the silence is and say something." -- Amy Goodman
Princeton in Asia Fellowship
Environmental Conservation with TRAFFIC, Hanoi, Vietnam
Hometown: Quito, Ecuador
Interests/pleasures: Charcoal drawing, dancing, running, writing
Best travel experience: Visiting Burma's ancient capital, Bagan, in 2011
What people don't know about me: I really wish I could sing well.
Words to live by: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." (Dr. Seuss)
Fulbright U.S. Student Program
English teaching assistantship, Bolu, Turkey
Hometown: Seattle, Washington
Interests/pleasures: teaching, cooking, preserving food, backgammon, painting
Best travel experience: Trying a macaroon for the first time in Paris when I was 13. We called them "dessert hamburgers"!
What people don't know about me: I could grow old happily in Walla Walla.
Words to live by: "Alice laughed. ‘One can't believe impossible things.' ‘I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. ‘. . .Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"
(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871)
DAAD InternXchange Program
Radio journalism and production, Berlin, Germany
Hometown: Seattle, WashingtonMajor: German Studies
Interests/pleasures: radio, music, journalism, travel, languages
Best travel experience: Wandering Istanbul with my Kumpels.
What people don't know about me: Although I keep ending up in landlocked places, I love surfing. In my old age, I will become a beach bum.
Words to live by: "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night . . . wake in the day to find out that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible." (T.E. Lawrence)
French Teaching Assistants Program (TAPIF)
English teaching assistantship, Auch, France
Hometown: Hermosa Beach, California
Major: Foreign Languages and Literatures (French)
Interests/pleasures: Reading, new foods, museum-hopping, cats
Best travel experience: Marseille, Aix-en-Provence and Arles, Fall 2012
What people don't know about me: I have a male alter ego named Carl.
Words to live by: "Il est utile de connaître d'autres langues que la sienna . . . C'est comme de connaître d'autres gens, d'autres pays." ("It is useful to know languages other than your own . . . It's like knowing other people, other countries.") (Assia Djebar)
Goldwater Scholarship
Science research scholarship
Hometown: Anchorage, Alaska
Major: Biology
Interests/pleasures: biology, reading, foreign-exchange markets, technical writing, flightless birds, human evolution, carotenoids
Best travel experience: Italy, 2011, with professors Chris Wallace and Ginger Withers for International Brain Organization World Congress.
What people don't know about me: I've always wanted to live in Arizona.
Words to live by: "Theories have four stages of acceptance: 1) this is worthless; 2)this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; 3)this is true, but quite unimportant; 4) I always said so." (J.B.S. Haldane)
DAAD Summer Study Grant
German studies, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
Hometown: Carson City, NevadaMajor: English
Interests/pleasures: writing, reading, swimming, magic, music (The Gathering)
Best travel experience: climbing the Volkerschlacht Denkmal in Leipzig, a massive memorial commemorating the defeat of Napoleon near Leipzig.
What people don't know about me: While I'm an introvert at heart, I really enjoy meeting new people, even if I don't show it at the time.
Words to live by: "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." (Arthur Edgar O'Shaughnessy)
Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship
Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Hometown: Bainbridge Island, WashingtonMajor: Applied Physics (through the 3/2 program)
Interests/pleasures: skiing, basketball, sailing, baseball, coffee
Best travel experience: Sailing with my family in the San Juan Islands.
What people don't know about me: I worked for a summer at a salmon processing plant in Alaska.
Words to live by: "Ask people how they got there, because I guarantee that no one took a direct path with no detours."
Watson Fellowship
Independent travel and study in Belgium, France, Egypt, UAE, China
Hometown: Seattle, WashingtonMajor: History
Interests/pleasures: cycling, chocolate fondue, people, "oldies" records
Best travel experience: An 88-hour bus trip across Senegal and Mali.
What people don't know about me: I'm a scholar of British romantic comedies.
Words to live by: "If things start happening, don't worry. Don't stew. Just go right along, and you'll start happening too." (Dr. Seuss)
Fulbright U.S. Student Program
Hindi studies, Jaipur, India
Hometown: Bellingham, Washington
Major: English
Interests/pleasures: creative writing, Drama Club, The Pioneer
Best travel experience: Study abroad in India, 2010.
What people don't know about me: In high school I was a member of a mime troupe.
Words to live by: "Vertigo is the conflict between fear of falling and the desire to fall" (Rushdie)
Fulbright U.S. Student Program
English teaching assistantship, India
Hometown: Walla Walla, Washington
Interests/pleasures: Music, food, playing drums, travel, reading, baseball, trying to speak foreign languages
Best travel experience: Independent study project in Bodhgaya, India, on study abroad, 2007.
What people don't know about me: I'm a synaesthete; I experience music and sound as colorful, visual shapes and landscapes in my mind's eye.
Words to live by: "How strange it is to be anything at all." (Jeff Mangum)
Watson Fellowship
Independent travel and study in United Kingdom, India, Nepal, South Africa and Colombia
Hometown: Seattle, Washington
Major: Psychology
Interests/pleasures: Music, hiking, new ways to dance and move, baking, slacklining, chocolate, rafting, languages, swimming, travel, new instruments
Best travel experience: Going to a friend's village to visit his family for Teej, the women's festival, in Nepal.
What people don't know about me: My feet are as flat as a pancake.
Words to live by: "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." (Rumi)
Davis Projects for Peace
“Building Community and Ultimate Peace,” Colombia
Hometown: Seattle, WashingtonMajor: Social Psychology
Interests/pleasures: international travel, Ultimate Frisbee, ceramics, whitewater rafting, snowboarding
Best travel experience: Hearing our team's name echo from the stadium speakers as World Champion and "Spirit of the Game" award recipient for sportsmanship. Never have I had a prouder moment as a coach.
What people don't know about me: Growing up, I spent multiple nights sleeping in igloos on snowboarding trips in the Northwest.
Words to live by: Live in the moment and cherish every moment.
Beinecke Scholarship
Funding for graduate study in arts, humanities or social sciences
Hometown: Glendale, WisconsinMajor: English
Interests/pleasures: Literature, literary theory, continental philosophy, swimming, ceramics, French, cats, board games
Best travel experience: study abroad in Paris.
What people don't know about me: I was not born in the United States.
Words to live by: "It is as if I am indebted to - I don't know to whom - to thinking responsibly. I am in a situation of trying to learn to whom, finally, I am responsible." (Jacques Derrida)
Killam Fellowship
Independent study, University of Alberta
Hometown: Missoula, MontanaMajor: BBMB (Biophysics, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology)
Interests/pleasures: biking, skiing, hunting
Best travel experience: Killam vs. Fulbright hockey game in Ottawa.
What people don't know about me: My favorite season is fall.
Words to live by: Git 'r done.
Critical Language Scholarship
Korean Studies, Yonsei University, Wonju, Korea
Hometown: San Francisco, California
Major: Film and Media Studies
Interests/pleasures: Language learning, astronomy, reading, writing, filmmaking, karaoke, blogging, badminton, contemplating about the meaning of life
Best travel experience: Whitman Summer Studies in China - Yunnan
What people don't know about me: I aspire to learn fluent Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese.
Words to live by: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
Fulbright U.K. Summer Institutes
Academic study, Wales Summer Institute
Hometown: New Bedford, Massachusetts
Interests/pleasures: Being a writer who doesn't write and a reader who never has time to read; alternatively, dogs and keeping my ears warm
Best travel experience: A night on the town in Aberystwyth, Wales
What people don't know about me: I wrote a book! I'm still editing it, though.
Words to live by: "Faithless is he who says farewell when the road darkens." - J.R.R. Tolkien
Fulbright U.S. Student Program
English Teaching Assistantship, Argentina
Hometown: Olympia, WashingtonMajors: Spanish, Philosophy
Interests/pleasures: Creative writing, foreign languages, drawing, animals
Best travel experience: the walk from the Blue Mosque to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul
What people don't know about me: I keep a detailed dream journal.
Words to live by: "Let the beauty of what you love be what you do." -Rumi
Fulbright U.S. Student Program
Research: Arsenic contamination and human health, Mexico
Hometown: Granby, ColoradoMajor: Chemistry
Interests/pleasures: oatmeal, coffee, socks
Best travel experience: saving a trapped donkey in Spain
What people don't know about me: I consider all squirrels to be my arch nemeses.
Words to live by: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."
Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs
Leadership training
Hometown: Mill Valley, California
Interests/pleasures: Running, climbing, reading science fiction
Best travel experience: Semester abroad in Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo
What people don't know about me: I can't watch horror movies because I get too scared.
Words to live by: "If we were supposed to talk more than we listen, we would have two mouths and one ear." (Mark Twain)