When Rachel Pike found out in early February that she won the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which pays for up to three years of graduate study at England’s University of Cambridge, she yelled before waking her roommate and calling home.
“It was like, 9 a.m.,” the Weinberg senior said. “I was waking up to go to a very long day of Fusion (Dance Company) rehearsal, and no one was around, and I screamed.”
Pike said she hopes to spend the next three years at Cambridge completing her doctorate in chemistry.
Sara Anson Vaux, director of Northwestern’s Office of Fellowships, and Assistant Director Christopher Hager estimated that each year they meet with about 900 students, many of whom apply for a fellowship at some point in their careers.
This year about 60 NU students applied for the Fulbright Program for U.S. Students, the most popular fellowship.
More than 100 undergraduates, graduate students and alumni have won fellowships this year, Vaux said. That number is expected to increase as results are finalized.
Vaux and Hager said they focus on helping applicants find programs that fit their interests and goals.
“We talk about what they’d like to accomplish in their lives, how their multiple interests will coalesce in their lives,” Vaux said.
Pike said she made her decision “kind of on a whim,” but Cambridge was a good match for her because it incorporates many of her interests in science.
Hager said there are no universal reasons for applying to receive a fellowship.
“For a lot of students, it’s a sense that they know they want to do something after graduating that builds on what they’ve done here,” he said.
Weinberg senior Tyler Jaeckel was accepted to New York City’s Urban Fellows Program, which allows participants to work with officials in the city government for nine months.
He said he applied because it would give him firsthand experience in fields he may pursue in graduate school.
“I’ve been really interested in community development and housing policy,” Jaeckel said. “(The Urban Fellows Program) is going to offer direct experience in the field that I wanted.”
Economics Prof. Mark Witte, who advises fellowship applicants, said it is difficult to predict who will receive a fellowship. Students often find the application process to be the most important part, he said.
“Good candidates who apply, even if they don’t win, come out with a lot of feedback and perspective about what they want to do in life,” Witte said.
Weinberg junior Andrew Lee said the most difficult part of the process was thinking about his own goals.
Lee won the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, which provides $7,500 a year to undergraduates studying math, natural sciences or engineering.
“(The hardest part was) thinking about what you are going to do for the rest of your life and putting that down on paper,” Lee said. “I think I spent a solid week just thinking about what I want to do.”
Because not all candidates win, the fellowship office concentrates on making the application process valuable, Hager said.
“The kind of thinking these applications ask of students is the kind of thinking everyone should have to do before going out into the world,” he said.
“That’s often as valuable an outcome for them as having won something.”
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