Zeff gives grads chance to pursue dreams

When Alice Hill ’02 learned that she had not been awarded one of 60 Thomas J. Watson Fellowships in the national competition last spring, she was disappointed. The $22,000 scholarship would have allowed her to spend a year studying the development of rivers and anti-dam movements in foreign lands. Instead, she made plans to work the summer as a whitewater guide in Colorado, California or Oregon — something she had been doing since her freshman year at Rice and loved to do.

As she was squaring away her plans, however, she got word that she would get to pursue her dream project after all — but not through the Watson. She had been chosen as the first recipient of the Roy and Hazel Zeff Memorial Fellowship, a scholarship created by Stephen Zeff, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management.

Named in honor of Zeff’s parents, the fellowship is given to the Rice student who received the most votes for a Watson nomination but did not receive the award.

”I was unaware of the existence of the Zeff Fellowship until the minute I was notified of receiving it,” Hill said. ”I had to pick up my father at the airport about 15 minutes after Dr. [Mark] Scheid, [assistant to the president], called me. I was literally screaming the whole way to Intercontinental Airport!”

Like the Watson, the Zeff Fellowship, which is funded in part by $17,000 contributed by Zeff and topped off by $5,000 from Rice, enables the recipient to travel outside the United States ”to live out a dream, from studying butterflies in the rainforest to learning acupuncture in China,” Zeff explained. ”There are so many meritorious proposals that are submitted each year [for the Watson]. This scholarship gives another Rice student the opportunity, so it’s as if Rice has an additional student who received the Watson.”

The inaugural Zeff Fellowship was presented to Hill in May, and through it she is traveling to Costa Rica, Tasmania and Patagonia (a region in South America in Argentina and Chile) to ”study the development of the rivers in developing countries and the decisions that are made on these rivers for various reasons,” Hill said. ”Specifically, I will be looking at using the river for the ecotourism industry as opposed to using it for energy-producing purposes and how the use of the river affects the local region sociologically, economically and environmentally.”

While Zeff is not the first member of the Rice community to establish such a fellowship, his is certainly among the most generous. ”Other scholarships are on the order of $2,000 to $5,000 for the summer. ”They are nothing on the scale of the Zeff,” noted Scheid. ”This is a wonderful, thoughtful scholarship for Dr. Zeff to offer.”

Hill, who expects to begin her travels in September, reflected enthusiastically on the opportunity the Zeff has offered her: ”I see this as a time when I can explore and learn on my own. I have a direction I want to go in, but didn’t really know where to go from there. The Zeff allows me to really explore that direction. I can’t wait to see where it takes me.”