Seniors work to meet fellowship deadlines

Sarah Siegel Life Editor

Jessica Linden-Swienckowski and Peter Chesney’s Terrace Apartment was looking pretty shabby in the days before Sept. 14. Clothes and papers were strewn across the floor, empty mugs testifying to several late nights. Linden-Swienckowski and Chesney are seniors, and they were applying for the prestigious Rhodes, Marshall and Fulbright fellowships.

For many students, fellowships and national service programs such as Teach for America and the Peace Corps present the ideal post-graduation opportunity. They come with prestige, exciting young colleagues, important contacts and an expiration date. They can both hone your interests and help you to advance them. But these programs as well as their application processes can also be overwhelmingly varied, complex and competitive.

Over the next few months The Miscellany News will be working with fellowship-winning alumnae/i, the Office for Fellowships and the Career Development Office to run articles detailing the summer and post-grad uate opportunities available to all students (not just seniors!), when to start thinking about them and how to apply.

The next major fellowship deadline is Oct. 1, when students can apply for the Thomas J. Watson fellowship. The Watson is a year-long fellowship granted to graduating seniors of a select group of liberal arts colleges, dedicated to independent study and travel abroad. The $25,000-35,000 grant comes with two major conditions: You can’t go anywhere you’ve been before, and you can’t set foot on United States soil for a full year. “It’s about the journey,” said Director of the Office for Fellowships and Pre-Professional Advising Lisa Kooperman, “it’s about finding yourself by relying on yourself.”

“The fellowship is built to make you adapt to whatever life throws you,” said former Watson Fellow and Vassar grad Jim Dodington ’05. Now a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, Dodington used his grant to work with HIV positive children in Malawi, Botswana and South Africa.

“My original ideas and contacts were good but not perfect,” said Dodington, “in the end it was very Vassar connected.”

Inspired by a summer experience at a stateside camp for HIV positive kids, Dodington said that friends at Vassar encouraged him to apply, helped him learn the language, and traveled with him once he was in Africa. In fact, he met one of his most important contacts, Ethan Zohn ’94 of Survivor fame, at a Vassar College Entertainment concert in the spring of his senior year. After meeting Zahn Dodington went on to establish a new outpost of Zahn’s NGO Grassroots Soccer, which fights against HIV and AIDs.

Ethan Nguyen ’06 received a Watson fellowship to travel around the world in pursuit of the stories of Vietnamese refugees. “After such a prolonged period of institutional and curriculum-based education, I wanted the freedom to pursue an academic project of my own,” said Nguyen in an e-mailed statement.

Both Dodington and Nguyen said the Watson year had been pivotal in the way they look at the world, what they want to do in it, and what, in the end, college is good for. Nguyen warned that “it’s quite a shock to learn how very little of your college education actually applies to daily living. All those great terms, like ‘post-modernism’, suddenly sound very empty. However, the things you discover about yourself while attending college ...have much more weight than any elaborate terminology you can swing around.”

The project doesn’t have to fit within a particular discipline to be worthy of a Watson. “They’re funding a person; not just an idea,” said Dodington. “Musicians, dancers, singers artists, do gooders—all those things combined. Some other Fellows I know spent their Watson years chasing birds around south America, or playing cello in Brazil and Argentina. It just has to be authentically your own project. They have to see the project in you.”

Seniors will have to see it pretty soon. The Office for Fellowships and Pre-Professional Advising will be hosting Dodington, Nguyen and another Watson Fellow for an informational session on Sept. 23 at 1 p.m. in Sanders Auditorium. For more information on the Watson and other post-graduation opportunities, contact Kooperman at likooperman@vassar.edu.