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BY YINGJIA WANG

In print | April 3, 2008

As fellowships and prizes news continues to trickle in, Swarthmore recently received news of more winners from the college. Marshall Morales ’08 and Noah Metheny ’03 were named Luce Scholars while James Saxon ’09 was named a Goldwater Scholar and Mark Mai ’09 received an honorable mention from the Goldwater Scholars Foundation.

According to its Web site, the Luce Scholars Program awards stipends and arranges internships for a yearlong work experience in Asia. Eighteen graduating seniors and recent alumni from the United States receive the scholarship every year. While most prestigious scholarships require extensive experience in the subject matter from its candidates, the Luce is notably different in that it calls for its applicants to have little or no prior knowledge of the Asian world.

Fellowships and Prizes Adviser Melissa Mandos says that the college received four internal candidates for the Luce this year, and, as with nearly all fellowships and prizes, Swarthmore then proceeded with an internal review process and sent three nominees to the Luce Foundation. While there are no caps on the number of internal candidates, there is a limit to the number of nominees that the college can put forward. Normally, each participating college is allowed two nominees, but colleges who advanced at least one nominee to the final rounds in the previous year are allowed three nominees in the current year. Therefore, Swarthmore was given three nomination spots this year.

Mandos said that the Luce has an especially demanding interview schedule for applicants. “Every nominee gets an initial interview by a Luce Scholar. Based on that, Luce Scholars make recommendations on who should be nominated for final interviews. The final interview is then actually a series of interviews throughout one day,” she said.

Morales initially became interested in applying for the Luce as a result of his wish to investigate the ties between the environment and urbanization in Asia.

“I was interested in the process of urbanization in Asia with special attention to the environmental degradation that comes with that,” Morales said. “And also, China, Japan, and the Koreas have very established traditions of urban design that are very unique. They have a lot of myth and glory … I found interesting the combination of historic and cultural ideas mixed with contemporary environmental issues.”

Although placements have yet to be finalized, Morales says that he will most likely be working at a landscape architecture firm in Tokyo or Beijing next year.

Unlike Morales, who is a current student at the college, this year’s other Luce winner graduated Swarthmore in 2003. Metheny matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law immediately following graduation from Swarthmore. Metheny said that he became interested in HIV/AIDS issues while at Swarthmore through classes and summer research. This interest persisted throughout law school in the form of internships and externships. At the moment, Metheny is working in Washington D.C. in the legal services department of a medical clinic geared towards LGBT health issues.

Metheny was attracted to the Luce because of the opportunity to take his HIV/AIDS work to Asia.

“The HIV/AIDS epidemic is a very pressing health and human rights issues in Southeast Asia. I heard about the Luce at Swarthmore and was always interested in applying. So, I thought that, given my interests in HIV/AIDS, it would be a good place to not only continue doing this type of work but also to gain experience in issues unique to South/Southeast Asia,” Metheny said.

He anticipates that his Luce placement will be in HIV/AIDS legal work in Thailand.

Metheny’s alumni status may have helped him in the application process in that his several years out of college allowed him to better focus his career plans. Mandos stated that the Luce Scholars Program desires applicants with a strong idea of their desired career paths. “The Luce is really looking for individuals who are very focused in terms of their career objectives. Sometimes alumni can have a slight advantage because they have been out there and have demonstrated commitment to their careers,” Mandos said.

Metheny credits the time since graduating from Swarthmore during which he spent working on strengthening his application. “I initially applied for the Luce my last year of law school and didn’t get it. I think one reason was that I didn’t know what I wanted to do enough to articulate my position. Being out in the workforce for over two years has given me an idea of what type of work I want to be doing,” he said.

Swarthmore also hit success with the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship this year. As stated on its Web site, the Goldwater Scholarship, which was established by former Senator Barry M. Goldwater, awards scholarships to rising college juniors and seniors who intend to pursue careers in the sciences, math and engineering. These scholarships are worth a maximum of $7,500 and are to be used towards undergraduate fees. This year, ten students from the college applied internally for the Goldwater and four candidates advanced as nominees, said Mandos. One student, James Saxon ’09, won the scholarship while another student, Mark Mai ’09, received an Honorable Mention.

Mandos emphasized that the Goldwater Program desires students with a strong focus on the three stated target career fields.

“The Goldwater is really looking for students that clearly are committed to careers in the sciences, math and engineering … It also really helps for students to have done work in the area such as some lab work. It is looking for students who will have initiative and impact in their fields,” Mandos said.

For Saxon, that experience came by way of extensive summer research.

“i.e., since after my sophomore year of high school), I have been working for the Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT) of the ATLAS project, one of the two large, multi-purpose detectors on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Particle Physics Labs) in Geneva, Switzerland. As a whole, the project (2000 people on this detector alone; thousands more in total), is a ‘discovery machine’; that is, it seeks to find ‘new physics’ beyond the standard model of our current understanding,” Saxon said in an e-mail.

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