Many students dream of spending a year abroad, free from economic concerns to pursue to research the topic of their dreams. For four Dartmouth students recently announced as winners of prestigious scholarships, their dreams came true.
Frank Aum '97, Daniel Fehlauer '97 and Esther Lee '97 have all been selected this year as recipients of the Fulbright Scholarship and James Hourdequin '97 has been named a Truman Scholar.
Aum, a psychology major, plans to use the scholarship to teach English to secondary school students in Korea.
"I often feel that I have an American mind but a Korean heart," said Aum. He said his Korean heritage was one of the motivating factors in choosing to teach in Korea.
"For that short moment between graduation and the real world, I wanted to just follow my heart" said Aum. He was born in California and raised in the United States, and has not been to Korea since he was one year old.
Aum said teaching is very important to him and he said he plans to "pursue an advanced degree as a professor" after his teaching assistantship in Korea ends.
Lee, a government major, decided to apply for the Fulbright after encouragement from Government Professor David Kang, who was advising her senior thesis.
"That's where my interest in Korea, my research for my thesis, and my proposal [for the Fulbright Scholarship] converge," Lee said.
Lee said she proposed to use the scholarship to research the "relationship between Confucianism and democratization" in Korea.
"I want to study the social and welfare policies in Korea -- how undeveloped the policies are and find out what the impediments are," Lee said.
Fehlauer might have missed the Fulbright application deadline if he had not run into Lee a few days before the deadline.
"I guess you could say it was spur of the moment," Fehlauer said. "If I hadn't bumped into Esther ..."
Fehlauer quickly put his application together and submitted an application for the teaching assistantship in Germany.
With his scholarship, Fehlauer plans to teach English, as well as physics and math, for 10 months in a rural town in eastern Germany to students in grades five to 13.
"It will be a reciprocal relationship, where I gain from them as they do from me," he said.
Fehlauer said he is unsure what he will do after the completion of his teaching assistantship in Germany but he said he wants "to teach in some form or another."
Chair of the Committee on Graduate Fellowships George Demko said the College has a "dazzling record" in producing recipients of the Fulbright Scholarship.
Demko said although the grade point averages of the winners of these scholarships tend to be very high -- as high as 3.7 -- they are not the determining factor.
"I worry about people judging by GPA," he said. "They are not a measure of ability to do creative research."
The Fulbright Scholarship, named after the late Senator J. William Fulbright, was created after World War II to provide opportunities for U.S. students to study or conduct research in 100 different nations.
Applicants for the Fulbright go through an extensive process. First, they must go through interviews in the fall with members of the Committee of Graduate Fellowships to earn nominations from the College.
Applicants must also create a detailed research proposal.
Hourdequin, the only undergraduate to win a Truman Scholarship this year, said "it was an honor." The scholarship will provide funding for his graduate school study in environmental policy.
Hourdequin also survived an extensive application process for the Truman Scholarship. He wrote 11 essays -- most of which concerned his plans for the future -- and also wrote a two-page proposal on a topic of international concern in which he had to present a problem and propose a solution.
"I wrote about phasing out logging on national forestlands," he said. "It was sort of a radical, outside of the mainstream position to take."
Hourdequin said he plans to attend either the Yale School of Forestry or the Duke School of Environment in the fall of 1998.
The Truman Scholarship, named after former President Harry S Truman, was established by Congress in 1975. The scholarship awards $30,000 to students in their third year of college who are interested in pursuing graduate study in government or public service.
