Two Northwestern students were awarded a year of all-expense paid study at Cambridge University in England next year.
Andrew Gruen, Medill ’07, and Weinberg senior Amber North are two of 45 American students chosen as Gates Cambridge Scholars this year. A total of 635 Americans applied for the scholarship.
North plans to pursue her masters in philosophy focusing on her three main interests: philosophy of science, philosophy of the mind and philosophy of history.
Gruen hopes to solve the expanding problem of information overload with his digital journalism experience.
Gruen said he fell over and couldn’t stand up when he received an e-mail at 1:33 p.m. Sunday announcing he was one of the scholarship winners.
“I was and still am in a slight sense of disbelief,” he said.
At Cambridge, Gruen will study culture and media to help combat a problem he calls “information obesity.”
“There’s a lot of implicit information out on the Web (but) it’s not in an easy-to-read format,” he said. “We need tools to help us turn that into something meaningful, to help us understand what that data is, what it means and how we can go about using it.”
To solve this problem, Gruen said he thinks people need to interact with media more directly, and tools should be built to help piece together and add context to disparate pieces of information.
Gruen, a digital executive producer for Hearst-Argyle Television, spent time in London when he worked for the BBC Winter Quarter during his senior year at NU.
Roger Boye, a professor emeritus at NU, met Gruen as a sophomore when Boye served as the master of the Communications Residential College.
“He has a great interest in the digital world and new technology and where all of this is leading the society,” Boye said. “Going to Cambridge is just a great match for his interest, intellectual ability and his enthusiasm.”
Both scholarship winners share passion for music outside of their academic work. While at NU, Gruen sang bass in two Music ensembles and one student group. North is a singer-song-writer with two albums and has performed in the U.S. and abroad.
“Cambridge has a tremendous music scene,” said Associate Director of the Office of Fellowships Elizabeth Pardoe. “I have no doubt that both of them will thrive in that environment where they can enjoy both music and academics.”
Pardoe, Weinberg ’92, speaks with experience: She studied in Cambridge for three years in the ’90s as a Marshall scholar.
North said she is most excited to study philosophy more in depth and to start her graduate work at Cambridge.
“The most exciting part of winning the Gates Scholarship is that I’ll be embedded in a community of scholars and pursue my discipline alongside the wealth of knowledge that will be the Gates community,” she said.
North explained that Cambridge is seen as one of the birthplaces of analytic philosophy, which is where her interests lie.
“The resources that I’ll have at my fingertips for starting my philosophy career are unparalleled,” North said.
Pardoe emphasized how important it is that both students were able to win a scholarship in such disparate fields of study.
“To have someone who excels in the highest level of philosophical inquiry and someone who works at the cutting edge of news media and technology … There are few universities in the world that can provide a fulsome education to both types of students and Northwestern provided that,” she said.
