Snagging the Big Scholarships

Maybe it was just a coincidence that a pair of Penn students won a Rhodes Scholarship and a Marshall Scholarship last fall, a few months after the new Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF) opened. After all, both Lipika Goyal (Rhodes) and Ari Alexander (Marshall) are highly qualified and engaging students with a proven commitment to research and helping others. They got their scholarships the old-fashioned way: they earned them.

    But the fact is that, despite the very high quality of its student body, Penn has traditionally lagged behind its peers when it comes to these prestigious fellowships—both in the number of applicants and in the number of winners. And while winning was not the main reason for launching the center—which is located in the Arts, Research and Culture House (ARCH) at 3601 Locust Walk—Provost Robert Barchi Gr’72 M’72 GM’73 cheerfully acknowledged that he would “certainly consider it a measure of success if we had more students winning the Rhodes and Marshall.”
    Dr. Arthur Casciato, CURF’s director, was pleasantly astonished by the instant double win, noting that only one other time in the University’s history —1983—had that happened.
    “I think what it signals is that we can do much better in these kinds of prestigious international competitions,” he adds. “This year has proved that the only thing that keeps Penn from winning these things with the same regularity as their peers is that Penn students don’t apply. It’s simply a matter of numbers—not ability, talent, desire or anything else.”
    Goyal, he points out, is the 16th Rhodes Scholar to come from Penn. Harvard, by contrast, has produced 289 Rhodes Scholars; Yale, 203. Only eight Penn students applied for the Marshall and the Rhodes this year. Compare that to Harvard, which averages between 80 to 100 applications for the Rhodes, or Cornell, which has “something like 60,” and one can see why Casciato sees a lot of untapped potential at Penn.
    “I know there are more talented people out there,” he said. But if they don’t apply, they won’t fly.
    “What’s the saying? ‘If you shoot for the stars, you land on the moon?’” said Goyal, a senior from Scotch Plains, New Jersey, majoring in the biological basis of behavior. “Everyone should apply. You just never know. Someone’s got to win it.”
    And, she emphasized: “Even if you don’t win a Rhodes, there’s no losing. You learn so much. You’re still a winner if you go through the process.”
    Goyal’s goal of improving healthcare to children in developing countries was given an additional boost by Penn’s University Scholarships program, which funded summer trips to Ghana (investigating malaria and sickle-cell anemia) and New Delhi (studying zinc deficiency and the feasibility of a national program to distribute zinc supplements). “That’s been an enormous part of my success at Penn,” she says of the program, and a “big part of my trajectory towards the Rhodes.”
    Her own interest in medicine was developed “in utero,” she says wryly, noting that her mother is a doctor, as are a number of her friends. “Medicine turns on something inside of me that nothing else does.”
    In addition to being a Benjamin Franklin Scholar, a writing advisor, and a Pennquest leader—not to mention a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity and at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania—Goyal is also president of the John Morgan Pre-Health Society. “That’s been great, because you get to reach a lot of pre-health students,” she says. “The only reason I got to where I am is through talking to people who’ve been through what I’ve been through. A lot of people have helped me along the way”—including her parents, Casciato, and Clare Cowen, CURF’s associate director for international fellowships.
    Goyal intends to pursue a two-year master’s degree in developmental studies, which includes the economics, politics, history and social anthropology of developing countries, though she concedes that there’s a “slight chance” that she might stretch that into the three-year doctorate. She also plans to apply to medical school after her stint in Oxford, and acknowledges that she
has no idea where she will ultimately find herself.
    “I think these two years at Oxford are going to be very telling and direction-giving years, because I’ll be studying a lot of major issues in the developing world,” she says, adding that where she ends up depends on “where I can make the most change.”
    Unlike Goyal, Alexander, a senior American history major from Providence, Rhode Island, was not a member of the fellowship scene at Penn. But like her, his driving urge is to help people, and he has been deeply involved in campus organizations devoted to increasing dialogue between different ethnic groups. After spending a semester at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and working on a kibbutz for half a year doing research on Palestinian refugees, Alexander helped start a dialogue group of Arabs and Jews on campus and another cross-cultural group called Confronting Cultural Issues on Campus; he also co-chaired Alliance and Understanding, a group devoted to bringing together the African-American and Jewish communities on campus. He also served as the undergraduate student representative to President Rodin’s Affirmative Action Council, and as a student consultant to the Penn Public Talks Project.
    It was after working as a counselor at a summer camp for Israeli and Palestinian youth that he first thought about applying for a fellowship—although he originally planned to apply for a Fulbright.
    “My idea was to look at all the organizations that are bringing Israelis and Palestinians together, and find out which are effective and which ones aren’t, and why not,” he recalls. It would be independent research, supervised by professors, and when he went to meet with Cowen about applying, she suggested he shoot for a Rhodes instead. After thinking about it some more, he decided to apply for the Marshall, which “allows you to choose any school in the UK rather than Oxford,” where he did not especially want to go. When he found a program in comparative ethnic conflict at The Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, he applied for it. In fact, he also won another scholarship—the Mitchell, which would have sent him to Ireland or Northern Ireland for a year—but opted for the Marshall because of its two-year grant.
    “My courses will only be for three nights a week,” he explains. “I’ll also be interning for a human-rights non-profit, and working as a bartender or waiter, and also going out at night to the music scene and theater. I think that overall that will be better than just sitting in the library every day.”
    After he finishes the one-year program in Belfast, Alexander is considering either a one-year program in modern Middle Eastern studies at Oxford or a master’s in comparative politics at the London School of Economics. Or he might decide to stay in Belfast and do a second one-year program at Queen’s University.
    “My emphasis is on wanting to understand more ways to help people,” he says. “Because of my background and my interests, I’ll probably end up doing that in the Middle East, but theoretically, I could end up somewhere else.”
    “Ari’s commitment to the resolution of conflict in the Middle East is the focus of his life,” says Casciatio, “but in some ways he has genuine questions of himself: ‘Should I be going to school, or should I be going to the Middle East to try to do something in a hands-on way?’ I think he’s honestly answered the question for himself that he needs to know more to be as effective as he can be.”
    Winning the scholarship, Alexander admits, “hasn’t sunk in at all.” (When he got the call telling him he had won, he thought it was a joke.) “It was a strange experience—everyone around is more excited and happy than you are. You feel kind of dazed, wondering what’s going on, or if you deserve it, but everyone in your world—your professors, your friends, your family—are going nuts. So I don’t really feel like I’ve internalized it. I have started to think about it a lot, how much I’m going to miss friends and family, but at the same time how excited I am about the opportunity.”

Fellowships are for Alumni, Too

Penn graduates, “especially recent ones,” are also eligible to apply for many scholarships, points out Clare Cowen, CURF’s associate director for international fellowships. “In fact, Penn graduates often make compelling candidates because of their additional work and life experiences.” Among those for which some alumni will be eligible are the Rhodes, Marshall, Luce, Mitchell, Churchill, Fulbright, Thouron and Gates Cambridge. Contact her at <[email protected]> or check out (http://www.upenn.edu/curf/administeredbyCURF.html).

Linking Research and Fellowships

We spoke to two of the driving forces behind the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships: Dr. Arthur Casciato, the center’s director, and Dr. Robert Barchi Gr’72 M’72 GM’73, the provost. What follows is an edited version of those two separate conversations.

GAZETTE: What was the impetus behind the center?

BARCHI:The impetus was to increase opportunities for undergraduates to be involved in all sorts of undergraduate research, in areas ranging from the humanities to the sciences, and to create an environment where students could exchange information about research they’re doing, learn about opportunities for support of research open to them, and generally interact with other students who are engaged in projects along the same avenue.
    It also included bringing the resources the University was providing for prestigious scholarships. Clearly, if students were going to compete for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, they would need a good deal of
preparation and guidance. We wanted to put that kind of expertise and resources into a convenient and accessible location for the student body.

GAZETTE: Was your office given a charge?

CASCIATO: Very clearly, as the title suggests, this is the office for undergraduate research and fellowships, and I don’t think those things are separate. They’re supposed to work in tandem. If we can be in touch with and promote and celebrate undergraduate research on the campus, it also give us access to identifying talented undergraduates who are doing interesting things and building a relationship with them. We can also educate them about the opportunity of these prestigious fellowships. And I think Penn is singular in having these two offices together.
    But Penn hasn’t done as well as it should be doing, in terms of winning Rhodes, in winning Marshalls, winning these other prestigious fellowships, and we were brought together to see what we could do about it. My job in the next year is to capitalize on this success and try to get more people to apply. I don’t know if we’ll win these fellowships again next year—there’s a lot of luck in it—but one way of judging how well we’ve done at the center is if we can get more people to apply.

GAZETTE: You’ve got bright students; what is it about the culture of the University that is causing them not to apply?

CASCIATO: There’s a kind of pre-professional fast track at Penn that characterizes the student body, for better or worse. In some ways, it draws attention away from these other, more prestigious awards. The competition for those jobs seems to be lively and fierce, and there’s all sorts of people here for that, but less for what we do.

GAZETTE: And yet if you look at one of the better-known winners of the Rhodes [former President Bill Clinton], that would seem to be something that might not hurt your chances in future life.

CASCIATO: That’s one of our jobs, to get people to see that the winning of one of these prestigious things doesn’t hurt your chances to succeed, but actually makes them better.
    The center’s job, in terms of its scholarships and in terms of research, is to strengthen programs that already exist—University Scholars, Benjamin Franklin Scholars, general honors—and to extend those services that are in those programs already to the entire University undergraduate community. So in a way, our two winners represented both halves of our constituents.
    But this is not going to be Rhodes and Marshall boot camp. We’re not going to add to the burden of kids who are already in a very difficult, fast-track world with all sorts of pressure. We want to take people who are talented, but one of those talents may not be how best to present those talents, and then to support them in that and help them to be confident and present who they are. In this particular culture it’s important to see who’s doing good work around here, but that’s not so we can draw them in here and make up all kinds of stuff that will help them be a Rhodes or a Marshall. I want them to be more natural, more organic, more themselves.