Two accomplished College students will head overseas this fall to earn masters' degrees as recipients of prestigious Mitchell and Marshall fellowships.
Fourth-year David Buckley, a political and social thought major, is bound for Northern Ireland to study comparative ethnic politics as a Mitchell Scholar.
Buckley is writing a thesis on religion and international peacemaking in Northern Ireland and Israel and Palestine. The outgoing president of the International Relations Organization, Buckley said he always has been interested in foreign affairs.
At Queens University in Belfast, Buckley plans to continue his study of religion's role in conflict.
"It's going to be really exciting to go up there and study about it and then walk out my front door and see it in process," Buckley said. "I've always been intrigued by these kind of long-standing conflicts that people can't seem to solve, and I noticed that lots of them had religious aspects to the conflict -- people using religion to fuel the conflict. That wasn't my religion, the religion I knew, so I got interested in how religious individuals not participating in the violence got involved in stopping it."
Fourth-year Kurt Mitman will study the nascent field of econo-physics at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar.
Mitman said that as a double major in physics and economics, the field seemed a good fit for his interests.
He engaged in a wide range of activities at the University, from neuroscience research, to the University Guide Service (tours for children are his favorite), to the International Relations Organization, where he co-founded a foreign affairs journal.
Mitman studied at Cambridge in his third year and said the experience was wonderful.
"It's part of the reason why I applied for Marshall and for Rhodes, because I loved it and I wanted to go back," Mitman said. "I'm psyched. It's going to be awesome."
Forty students nationwide become Marshall Scholars each year and earn a master's degree in any discipline at a university in the United Kingdom. Mitman will be the University's sixth Marshall Scholar. Katie Dirks, who graduated in 2001, was the most recent Marshall Scholar to hail from the University.
The Mitchell scholarship program launched five years ago and sends its participants, 12 each year, to Irish universities. The University claims one graduate besides Buckley: 2001 alumnus John Kiess, who studied comparative ethnic politics as well.
Together with Rhodes scholarships, Mitchell and Marshall fellowships represent some of the highest honors for American college students, said Nicole Hurd, assistant dean and director of the Center for Undergraduate Excellence.
This year there were 245 applications for the Mitchell scholarship alone, and 20 students were selected for interviews. The University had multiple finalists.
"I think it shows how well our students perform in national fellowship competition," Hurd said.
She said Buckley's and Mitman's awards reflect well on the University and the students themselves.
"They're both incredibly well-deserving, gifted young men," Hurd said. "We're very excited about them."
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