Presidential Fellowship provides selected students with $30,000 in annual stipends for two years
Ten highly talented doctoral students joined Rutgers this fall as the first class of Presidential Fellows, a program to strengthen graduate education in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering at the university’s three campuses.
Announced last year by President Richard L. McCormick as the first new graduate fellowship program in two decades, it provides selected students with $30,000 in annual stipends for two years, tuition and fee reimbursement, and additional years of support through assistantships and other sources.
Addressing the fellows at a welcoming reception October 9 in Winants Hall on the New Brunswick Campus, McCormick said that doctoral students are “at the center of the missions of the university,” engaged in forefront research activities and often teaching in undergraduate classrooms, while preparing to become leaders in academia, industry, and public service.
Even in times of budgetary constraint, McCormick said it is essential to enhance the university’s commitment to excellence in graduate education.
“To attract the most talented students for Ph.D. studies requires multiyear packages of support that are competitive with those offered by our peer institutions,” McCormick said. “To attract exceptional candidates requires packages that exceed the norm.”
This year’s fellows were selected last February from more than 60 doctoral study applicants nominated by 27 of the university’s Ph.D. program directors. A committee chaired by Michael Pazzani, vice president for research and graduate and professional education, selected the finalists.
The 2007 fellows include students in education, engineering, English, neuroscience, philosophy, political science, psychology, and childhood studies, the first Ph.D. offering on the Camden Campus.
Graduate School–New Brunswick Acting Dean Jolie Cizewski noted that while doctoral applicants couldn’t self-nominate for the fellowship, knowledge of its availability most likely led many to seriously consider Rutgers when choosing graduate schools.
“Our selection committee was impressed with the quality of nominees, and we found it very difficult to select the finalists,” she said. “As the program gains visibility in the coming years, our job will only get harder – and that’s good.”
Just as the fellows vary in their backgrounds and study programs, they offer different reasons for appreciating the honor and support.
“This is a great gift; a big pat on the back,” said Lara Saguisag, one of the first students in Camden’s doctoral program in childhood studies. “It says to me, ‘Yes, you are going in the right direction.’ And it assures me that more doors will open.”
Saguisag also feels her fellowship affirms the childhood studies program as a field worthy of scholarly pursuit. An accomplished author of children’s books, she had been disappointed with how little scholarly work occurred in children’s literature. Her undergraduate English study in her native Philippines had a decidedly adult-literature focus. Her master’s work at Hollins University in Virginia and additional study at New York’s New School gave her the children’s literature focus she desired, but she wanted the depth of doctoral study. At a conference in California, Holly Blackford, assistant professor of English at Rutgers–Camden, put out brochures on the new Rutgers program, and when Saguisag read it, she knew she’d found a match.
“This is an interdisciplinary program where we explore our different and changing notions about children and childhood,” said Saguisag, who plans to draw on her upcoming experiences for future writing projects.
For Tim Nordin, who left his job as a high school physical sciences teacher in Columbus Junction, Iowa, to study in the Ph.D. program in education on the New Brunswick Campus, the fellowship is further evidence of the supportive atmosphere he’s felt at Rutgers. “I get the impression from the faculty and my fellow students that they want me to succeed.” Not so at some other universities he looked into, which came across as “sink or swim.”
Nordin, a physics major from Iowa State, is interested in school reform and how schools can best work within national policies such as No Child Left Behind. “Work on education reform is predominantly done at universities on the east and west coasts,” he noted, “and California wasn’t right for our family,” he said, settling into New Jersey with his wife and growing family. Their second child was born a week before the reception.
Also pursuing graduate work after time in the workplace is Octavio Gonzalez. He believes the fellowship affirms that returning students have a place in doctoral education. “It’s important to recognize nontraditional paths to graduate studies. It makes the university stronger,” he said. “I represent that different approach.”
Gonzalez holds a B.A. in comparative literature from Swarthmore College and an M.A. in English literature from Penn State. Between those programs, he worked in fashion and publishing and did research in the nonprofit sector. Rutgers appealed to him for its distinction in the field of gender studies. He will be studying modernist literature of the late 19th and early 20th century, specializing in British literature with French influence. Authors of this era, notably Christopher Isherwood and Gertrude Stein, whom Gonzalez plans to focus on, were raising issues of gender and sexual politics in their work.
Julia Basso enrolled in the integrated neurosciences program at Newark. She feels the fellowship has increased her credibility in pursuing grants for research on how the body and mind work together. “I’m already working on a grant proposal to the NSF [National Science Foundation] for predoctoral support,” she noted.
Basso appreciates her department’s focus on both molecular and behavioral science, an approach that tracks with her undergraduate work at Middlebury College in Vermont. A major in neuroscience and dance, she said her six-month study on the relationship of yoga and smoking to respiratory function and mood reflected the mind-body focus that the Rutgers program pursues. She also brings two years of clinical science work on Alzheimer’s disease at Thomas Jefferson University to Rutgers.
Other students in this year’s class of fellows, and their Ph.D. programs, are:
- Janna Ferguson, political science, New Brunswick
- Andres Grosmark, integrative neuroscience, Newark
- Peter Pantelis, social psychology track in psychology, New Brunswick
- Robert Pasternack, biomedical engineering, New Brunswick
- Meghan Sullivan, philosophy, New Brunswick
- Daniel Wong, mechanical and aerospace engineering, New Brunswick