With the support of $10,000 each from the Stamps Family Charitable Foundation, the projects of the six inaugural Stamps Scholars are underway, from studying ancient canals in Mexico to analyzing the environmental impacts of Dartmouth’s fuel source.
The organization aims to be the “Rhodes Scholarship for undergraduates,” program director of the Stamps Family Charitable Foundation Randy McDow said.
The projects of the scholars — which include five Dartmouth juniors and one senior — are varied, but each will involve intense individual research or experiential learning.
Most of the roughly 220 Stamps Scholarships given out annually are awarded to students entering a four-year university, but at Dartmouth, which does not give merit scholarships, the scholarships instead go to upperclassmen to fund independent experiential learning projects.
Currently, the Stamps Foundation partners with 41 universities around the country.
“Our goal is to identify and support outstanding students, but also to enable them to reach their goals sooner by providing financial support and a network that can help them move faster and higher than they would otherwise,” McDow said.
Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning interim director and government professor Lisa Baldez said that the Stamps program allows students to “apply what they learn in the classroom to new settings.”
The Stamps program will also incentivize students who might not normally engage in research to participate in large independent projects, she said.
“The funding they get from the Stamps Foundation is very generous, and my hope is that because it is so generous it will give the opportunity to students who would be constrained by finances to participate in this initiative,” Baldez said.
The scholars’ independent research programs of study are highly diverse.
Lucia Pohlman ’15 is attempting to integrate healthy, local food into Dartmouth’s dining system, and has used her funding, in part, to finance research on campus last summer and distribute surveys on food.
“When I first started this project, I had no idea what Dartmouth Dining Services was doing,” Pohlman said. “I felt pretty ignorant walking out of my first meeting thinking, ‘They did all this and I didn’t know about it?’ I felt stupid!”
Pohlman said that DDS already uses New England-made organic Cabot yogurt, humanely-grown meats and eggs from Pete and Gerry’s Organic Eggs, a local company. One of Pohlman’s ideas is to implement a community-supported agriculture initiative in the Collis Student Center, through which students can purchase a box of fresh produce each week from local farms.
Pohlman said that initiative, along with many local agriculture-based projects, will be easy to integrate into sophomore summer, as it fits well with the local growing season.
“[Sophomore Summer] not only matches the food production, but students have more time and ability to live and cook off-campus,” she said.
Pohlman hopes to use some of her remaining Stamps funding to visit other colleges and universities in the near future to gain an understanding of their methods of bringing organic and local foods to campus, she said.
Andrés Mejía-Ramón ’16 will use the Stamps funds he was awarded to study ancient canals in the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan in Mexico.
Mejía-Ramón first used satellite images of the ancient city to attempt to locate features that could be canals, then used geophysical methods to detect where canals are likely located. His next step will be to begin excavation. Mejía-Ramón said that he has spent six to ten hours a day for the past month preparing to apply for permits to begin archeological digging.
Katherine Crane ’16 will focus on developing her ArtxChange Marketplace Social Enterprise — a website that aims to pair artists with nonprofit causes to which the artists can donate a portion of each sale they make.
Crane developed a prototype website last year in the Neukom Digital Arts, Leadership and Innovation Lab, and will use part of her Stamps funding to hire employees to develop the final version of the website, she said.
Crane is currently testing her prototype site and interviewing artists and nonprofits, and will also attend relevant conferences in the spring.
“I’m definitely learning a lot through doing this, especially about the start-up process, particularly commercial entrepreneurship,” Crane said.
Rachel Margolese ’16 is researching the net environmental impact of different fuels “from cradle to grave” — when the fuels are first extracted from the ground until they are burned at Dartmouth. Her project aligns with current discussions to replace No. 6 fuel oil — an inexpensive but environmentally harmful fuel source — and she hopes to explore alternative fuel sources.
Margolese’s project — which is partly run through the Office of Sustainability — will investigate greenhouse gas emissions, water usage and drilling practices, and she intends to travel to Texas during an off-term to learn about the oil drilling process.
Thomas Wang ’16 has founded the Millennial Action Coalition, a grassroots advocacy group that aims to mobilize millennials around a health care reform agenda. He said in an email that the Stamps scholarship helped reduce travel and promotional costs, as well as engage with leaders in the health care space.
Leehi Yona ’16, who is studying Arctic issues through a series of conferences on international Arctic policy, research and civic advocacy, was unavailable for comment, citing limited internet access while she is abroad.
The application process for the scholarship includes a written project proposal, a questionnaire and interviews both with Dartmouth staff and Roe Stamps, a Stamps Family Foundation co-founder.
Mejía-Ramón, who had his interview with Stamps through Skype from an internet cafe in Mexico, said that at the close of his interview, Stamps invited him to join his “army of geniuses.”
