Rice receives six Fulbright foreign study scholarships

Rice receives six Fulbright foreign study scholarships

BY MAURO DE LORENZO
Special to the Rice News

Rice University had one of its best-ever years in the Fulbright Scholarship competition in 2006, with four undergraduates, one graduate student and one staff member winning the prestigious foreign study award.

Baker College senior Jo Kent will spend a year at the Women’s Center for Legal Studies and Legal Aid in Beijing, the first organization in China to provide legal aid to women. She is majoring in Asian studies, history and policy studies. She was also a Freeman-Asia Scholar and a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow, as well as a recipient of Rice’s Barbara Jordan Scholarship and the Leebron Smyth Travel Fellowship. She was the vice chair of the Baker Institute Student Forum at Rice.

Wiess College senior Jason Lee will study Chinese energy security at Beijing University. He is a biochemistry and policy studies major. Lee has been active at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Last year he was a Center for the Study of the Presidency Fellow.

Jones College senior Ian MacCormack will spend the next year studying Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan and Sanskrit philology at Kathmandu University in Nepal. He is a double major in mathematics and religious studies and the station manager at KTRU, Rice’s radio station.

Kelly Wright graduated from Rice in December with a Bachelor of Arts in Asian studies and political science. She was awarded a Fulbright to teach English in Taiwan, but will instead take advantage of the Zeff Fellowship she received.

Graduate student Brian Viliunas will study clarinet at the Grieg Institute in Bergen, Norway, next year. He came to Rice after earning a bachelor’s degree in music at Northwestern University in 2004.

Natalia Ksiezyk, interim director of Leadership Rice, has been selected to teach English in Argentina beginning in March 2007. She graduated from Rice in 2001 with degrees in cognitive science, psychology and policy studies. In 2003 she earned a master’s degree in Central European Studies from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

The Fulbright program is administered by the U.S. Information Agency and awarded by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board on the basis of a national competition. Fulbrights are awarded nationally each year to graduating seniors and graduate students who are U.S. citizens.

Awards are based on the applicant’s personal statement, proposed project, transcript, faculty recommendations and a language exam, if applicable. Each scholarship covers one year of university study and research abroad.

—Mauro De Lorenzo is the director of scholarships and fellowships in the Office of the Dean of Undergraduates.