With summer approaching, Occidental’s campus chatter buzzes with students’ summer plans. Just in time to help students achieve their dream, emails regarding jobs or internships from Handshake, the Hameetman Career Center (HCC), Oxy Arts, summer research programs and more flood students’ inboxes. One way to fund summer opportunities is through a travel grant, where students can receive financial assistance or awards to support their academic or work-related travel.
The John Parke Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy, known as the Young Student Grant, supports student work related to international affairs or economic development. Priscilla Falter, the assistant director of the initiative, said that the Young Student Grant provides funding opportunities for independent research, unpaid internships and travel costs to conferences or other types of academic gatherings.
“These funding opportunities are available to all students on campus, all majors,” Falter said. “It’s important because research, internships and traveling can be very expensive to do.”
If students are interested in applying for the Young Student Grant, Falter said students should be able to explain how their internship or research project is related to world affairs or the global economy, as well as present a letter of support from a faculty member.
While the Young Student Grant is unique to Occidental, the college also offers students other ways to receive funding for travel — these include the Gilman, Boren and Critical Language scholarships as well as the Fulbright Award. According to Jennifer Locke, the Director of International and National Fellowships, each fellowship has their own set of requirements and missions, but they all have one thing in common: to help students achieve their research goals in higher education.
“Any kind of study abroad is very valuable but some of these fully funded opportunities are very unique and very helpful for students who want to use language skills or the skills one gets from interacting with people from other cultures,” Locke said.
According to Locke, these opportunities go beyond just the experience of leaving the U.S. or engaging in new research. The skills learned in these programs can benefit students’ lives well past their college careers.
“The Critical Language Scholarship has been found to bring student’s foreign language level up by two levels,” Locke said. “It yields enormous benefits in language acquisition and language study as well as the ability to engage with the local culture, so it’s a pretty unique opportunity.”
Where other programs focus on in-college learning and development, the Fulbright Award is unique as it is a postgraduate opportunity to continue one’s endeavors in research and education.
“Students who do the Fulbright [Award] are often stronger candidates for graduate school applications as they have this greater research experience in a global context,” Locke said. “The people that do the teaching and cultural immersion are often more [prepared] to be educators, physicians and lawyers because they have those communication skills with people from very different backgrounds.”
Peter Vartanian (junior) is a past recipient of the Young Student Grant and now works as an advisor for the initiative. With the grant, he said he went to Austria, his home country, and studied the effect of Nazism and World War II on right wing tendencies and political thought on different generations in the country.
“For me, Young was truly eye opening,” Vartanian said. “It made me consider for the first time not only a future in academia and research but also the merits of that outside of the classroom.”
Vartanian said the experience of taking his research outside of the classroom helped him become more passionate about his research and take it to new heights. The next steps are to take his research to programs at Georgetown, Scripps and Stanford to share his findings, he said.
“The Young Grant is unlike anything else with its emphasis on international affairs,” Vartanian said. “I think international travel is essential for not only imbibing a sense of global citizenship but also rendering students to be aware of issues in not only international relations, but the academic aspect at large.”
Vartanian said he also respected the interdisciplinary aspect of the Young Student Grant, as any major that can connect their studies to international affairs is able to apply. Falter said that with the help of the Young Initiative, students can have a wide variety of options of adding international research into their repertoire.
“[The Young Grant] benefits their education and their time at Oxy by having access to funds so that they can take advantage of those opportunities,” Falter said.
Contact Eliana Joftus at joftus@oxy.edu.
