“Renaissance kid” is a title to which most Northwestern students aspire: undergraduate research position, intramural sports team, a GPA to make graduate schools salivate.
And now, eight NU undergraduates will be adding prestigious fellowships to that repertoire.
The Office of Fellowships announced two additional awards this week, adding to NU’s coup in Congressional scholarships this year.
“This is the first time since I have been in the office that we have maxed out like this in one year,” said Elizabeth Pardoe, associate director of the Office of Fellowships, which handles the nominations and applications of NU students.
Four NU students were awarded the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship this year, the maximum number any single university can receive. NU was one of only three schools in the country that had all four of their Goldwater nominees selected, Pardoe said.
The Goldwater Scholarships are awarded to the nations most promising undergraduates in science, math and engineering.
This year’s recipients were Weinberg junior Andrew Groves, Weinberg senior Dennis Hu, Weinberg sophomore Marc Giesener and McCormick senior Samantha Strasser. To have all four NU Goldwater nominees actually win the award was shocking, said Sara Vaux, director of the Office of Fellowships.
“These scholarships mark the success of NU as a research university, they mark the kind of education that we give our students on the ground at NU,” she said.
She said students like Strasser, who is a biomedical engineer in addition to being a poet and an athlete, are emblematic of the kind of student that the school prides itself on.
Two students were named Udall Scholars-a Congressional scholarship for undergraduates with a demonstrated commitment to the environment, tribal public policy or Native American health care.
This year’s winners were McCormick junior Isabelle Ji and Weinberg junior Emily Wright.
Ji, an environmental engineering student, is also in Kellogg’s undergraduate certificate program. She said she would like to pursue a career that combines sustainability in business practices.
“I’m interested in research, but I want to change things,” she said.
Ji’s first brush with environmental advocacy came during her high school summers when she traveled to the Shaanxi province in China to teach English to young students there.
When she arrived, however, she found that Taigu, the town in which she was born and lived for several years, had become dirty and polluted. So she added a new item to what was supposed to be a language-learning curriculum: environmental awareness.
“I wanted these kids to care and to know what was happening around them,” she said. “Because they didn’t seem to notice or care.”
A Beinecke Scholarship went to Weinberg junior Hana Suckstorff and a Merage American Dream Fellowship was awarded to Weinberg sophomore Ina Jani.
Suckstorff, a self-described “history nerd” with a pronounced passion for Renaissance Italy, can recall the moment sophomore year of high school when she first read about the Bonfire of the Vanities.
“As someone who is a religious person and loves the classics, I found the conflict in his history particularly interesting,” she said.
Suckstorff, who counts Leopold Fellow, club tennis player and Willard Residential College community assistant among her myriad campus identities, said she first considered applying for a fellowship to fund graduate work her freshman year when she attended an introductory fellowship workshop.
Fellowship applications increased across the board, Pardoe said, most notably for the Udall-a reflection of the increased focus on environmental science and policy on campus, she said.
Pardoe said she knows how far the office, with which she has worked for the past four years, has come since she was an undergraduate.
“As someone who was a fellowship nominee and winner in 1992, when (the office) was one devoted and terribly overworked Medill professor, Roger Boye, today is no comparison,” she said.
The office currently employs a full-time staff of four PhDs, Pardoe said.
Vaux, who helped found the office, said in its 12 years, interest in fellowships has increased as professors increasingly open doors for research opportunities to undergraduates.
“There is more hunger, I have detected among faculty and students, for these fellowships,” Vaux said. “They showcase the kind of capstone programs we have developed, like Kaplan and Brady and the Integrated Science program.”
Keeping the fellowship program thriving is tantamount to staying competitive among peer universities, Vaux said. It is something which both she and Pardoe have made a consistent refrain in their conversations with University President Morton O. Schapiro.
“We want to be known for our sterling undergraduate offerings,” Vaux said. “And these fellowships, in these numbers, solidify that.”
