While many seniors are faced with getting jobs or going to grad school next year, Aaron Paige ’04 will spend it traveling in Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey and Egypt. Lauren Graber ’04 will spend it in Thailand, Egypt, Norway and India. And someone else is footing the bill. Paige and Graber were both awarded Thomas J. Watson Fellowships, which gives them $22,000 to spend a year abroad studying a topic of their choice.
According to its website, “The program provides Fellows an opportunity for a focused and disciplined year of their own devisin— period in which they can have some surcease from the lockstep of prescribed educational and career patterns in order to explore with thoroughness a particular interest.”
Each year, the fellowship is given to up to fifty students from any of fifty participating colleges and universities.
During his time abroad, Paige, a music major, plans to explore the traditions of Arabic percussion.
“I’m focusing on the sharing, transmission and appropriation of rhythm,” he said. “I also want to look at how musicians construct their musical identity and what the musicians themselves have to say about their own music—what they feel defines their music as Tunisian or Egyptian. There’s a lot we all can learn from other people’s musical traditions. Music resonates with people in a very powerful way.”
Graber, who is majoring in biology and the Science in Society Program (SISP), will study cross-cultural healthcare, particularly for refugees.
“I’m really interested in how people communicate with their physicians, especially when there are two different cultures involved,” Graber said. “I’ll be working with refugees, who are in dire need of help. Their interactions are much more immediate and urgent.”
She says both her experience in SISP and work she has done outside of school piqued her interest in the subject and prepared her to embark on the project.
“My SISP classes taught me how to question and consider cross-cultural healthcare, so I have some theoretical background,” she said. “But I also lived in a refugee camp while I was abroad and worked in Minneapolis with nutrition [of Somali refugees].”
Though Paige and Graber have the next year mapped out for them, they are looking further ahead at what they will do when they return to the U.S.
“My plan is to go into higher education and hopefully get a master’s in ethnomusicology,” Paige said. “Then I’d like to teach, whether in the high school level or university level.”
“I don’t really know what I’ll do when I get back,” Graber said. “Maybe medical school, maybe public health, maybe I’ll go to Guatemala and learn Spanish. I don’t know.”
The application process for the fellowship was intense, Paige said. First, he had to submit a brief proposal to a committee of Wesleyan faculty from various departments, who reviewed the proposals and conducted interviews with applicants. The committee then chose four of the proposals it reviewed to submit to the contest.
“The Watson kind of consumed my whole year to a certain extent, and I put so much effort into it that it felt like I was taking another class,” Paige said.
Graber agrees, but said she found plenty of help on campus.
“There was lots of wonderful support from administration, faculty and the other people applying for the fellowship,” she said.
After all the work of applying, finding out that he had gotten the fellowship was a shock, Paige said.
“I didn’t know what to feel. Of course I was really excited, and on the other hand the reality of it finally sunk in. There’s one thing formulating a project and talking about it and then there’s another thing when someone tells you that you can do it,” Paige said. “It’s scary to a certain degree. It’s daunting because it’s this huge deal and I’m going to be spending one year of my life focused on this project and this passion.”
Graber said she is thrilled to have the opportunity to immerse herself in something so important to her, but is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the experience.
“I’m really excited because this is exactly what I wanted to do,” she said. “But leaving the country for a full year is intimidating. It’s the type of thing I don’t know what to expect to get out of it. Hopefully a smidgen of insight to understand how to sensitively treat people from other cultures.”
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