On a Monday in late March, Ben Randolph ’15 opened an email. By the time he had finished reading it, he knew he was a Beinecke Scholar. The notification, which, came over a month early told Randolph he was one of 20 students chosen nationally to receive over $30,000 in funding for graduate school.
In the past two months, several other Dartmouth students have received prestigious scholarships and fellowships, all of which will help fund graduate education or higher-level research.
Shoshana Silverstein ’15 was selected as a 2014 Harry S. Truman Scholar, Sarah Hammer ’15 and Hongyu Chen ’15 were named 2014 Goldwater Scholars and Ala’ Alrababa’h ’14 was named a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Kristin O’Rourke, assistant dean for scholarship advising, said in a February email interview that Dartmouth students write over 200 separate scholarship applications per year.
The 59 Truman Scholars were chosen from a pool of 655 applications from 294 colleges. The College has had a Truman Scholar every year since the 2010-11 academic year, and has had 25 since the award’s inception in 1977. One other Dartmouth student applied for the scholarship this year, and between two and four students have applied each year for the past five years, according to data provided by O’Rourke last term.
In the Ivy League this year, Brown University, Cornell University, Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania each also saw one student nominated as a Truman Scholar.
Silverstein called the Truman Scholarship — which grants students up to $30,000 to pursue graduate studies with the goal of going into public service — a perfect fit for her interests, which include law, education policy and civil rights.
“I’ve known since the beginning of college that I wanted to go into law,” Silverstein said, adding that her experience studying U.S. government in high school led to her current passions.
She said being homeschooled motivated her interest in education policy.
Brandon DeBot ’14, who won the Truman Scholarship last year, said that scholarship advising from the College helped significantly with his application responses and interview preparation. He added, however, that the advising office should conduct more scholarship outreach, citing that many students do not apply to scholarships because they are unaware of the opportunities.
Unlike the public service-oriented Truman Scholarship, the Goldwater Scholarship seeks to support students pursuing mathematics, science and engineering.
Hammer said that she learned about the Goldwater Scholarship through a panel held by the Undergraduate Deans Office. She applied because it was the only scholarship specifically supporting science and Ph.D. programs.
Created by Congress in 1986, the Goldwater Scholarship covers up to $7,500 per year in graduate school costs. Out of the 1,166 mathematics, science and engineering students nominated by American college faculties, only 283 sophomores and juniors were selected.
Hammer said that she wants to pursue graduate studies in chemical engineering, focusing on alternative energy and fuel. She said that, eventually, she would like to become a professor and have her own laboratory.
Chen said he plans to combine an M.D. with a Ph.D. in computer science and research biological and biomedical topics through computational methods.
Unlike both the Truman and Goldwater Scholarships, the Beinecke Scholarship simply supports the “graduate education of young men and women of exceptional promise,” rather than a specific field of study.
Randolph will receive $4,000 prior to entering graduate school and an additional $30,000 while attending graduate school, where he plans on studying Native American literature, philosophy and theory.
Randolph said he was directed to the Beinecke Scholarship by a professor, who later acted as a “very, very useful” scholarship advisor.
Three other Dartmouth students were named to the scholarship in the past five years.
In November 2013, Joseph Singh ’14 and Jonathan Pedde ’14 were awarded the Rhodes Scholarship, the first College students to receive the prestigious award since Gabrielle Emanuel ’10 in 2010.
Pedde is a former member of The Dartmouth senior staff.
Alrababa’h did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
