The Trail

Issue date: 3/30/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Will Mclain

Every year UPS students have an opporunity to apply to receive a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. These fellowships are a tremendous opportunity; each winner receives $25,000 to travel all over the world in a year of independent study focused around a carefully chosen project. It is a highly competitive process, with 50 graduating seniors chosen out of nearly 1,000 applicants from 50 private liberal arts colleges around the country.

This year's winners from UPS are seniors Leif Rasmuson, Kendra Loebs and Zorba Leslie. While each of these students shares the same passion and vision for exploring and studying the world through travel, they are all very different and have a range of interests on which to focus.

Biology major Rasmuson will look at the transition from local to commercial fisheries in his fellowship titled, "Changing Seas: Evolving from Traditional to Commercial Fisheries." His focus on aquaculture will hopefully show how different cultures use fisheries for sustainability, as well as analyze the positive and negative effects of these transitions. He will travel to Norway, Chile, Japan and Austrailia.

"I've been interested in fisheries since third grade," Rasmuson said. When asked about how he felt about receiving such an honor, he said, "I was granted a special opportunity-I don't think I'm exceptional at all. If everyone looked at what truly drove them and found a way to transform it into a Watson then anyone could do it."

Fellow Watson winner Loebs, who graduated in December and is also a biology major, is doing a project titled, "Biology and Belief in the Manual Management of Chronic Pain." She will travel to Morocco, India, Thailand, Japan and Tonga.

Loebs said that she took a semester off after her sophomore year to travel to Peru. While there she injured her ankle and tried to get it treated at the local health clinic to no avail. She went to a local "bone healer," who used massage and holistic treatments to help her. Ever since then she has wanted to explore these different types of healers and the traditions that they come from.

Loebs is incredibly grateful for the Watson Fellowship.
"This is something I'd never have a chance to do otherwise - a comparative study of all these different practices in all these different countries," Loebs said. "There's no way I'd be able to afford studying abroad to do all of this."

The third Watson Fellow is Leslie, a politics and government major with a focus on international relations who will be researching "Finding Justice: Learning to Reconcile the Past to Live in the Present."

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