May 4, 2001

Three Middlebury College students

awarded Watson Fellowships

MIDDLEBURY, VT.—For the fourth year

in a row, three Middlebury College students were awarded Thomas J.

Watson Fellowships. Seniors Jonathan Reiber of Dedham, Mass., Molly

Holmberg of Orono, Maine, and Elizabeth Harper of Leawood, Kans., are

the recipients of the 2001 fellowships. Each student will receive

$22,000 to travel outside the United States and explore a topic of

his or her own design.

Watson Fellows are chosen in a

two-step process that requires nomination from one of the

participating 50 top liberal arts colleges in America, followed by a

national competition. After more than 1,000 students applied to the

first round of selection, 60 Watson Fellows were chosen.

Reiber, a religion major whose

proposal is titled “Faith-Based Peacemaking Communities and the End

of Estrangement,” will travel to Italy, Northern Ireland and South

Africa. In his personal statement to the fellowship organizers he

wrote, “My Watson Fellowship would help me further discover the ways

that we come to know and value each other despite the differences and

conflicts that come between us. If it is in the shelter of each other

that the people live, and I believe that it is, I want to see how I

can help build that shelter.” Reiber would like to continue seeing

people move toward peace and conflict resolution through community

dialogue, and inter-faith and multi-cultural tolerance.

Reiber has experience working on

community issues, including his role as a student organizer of the

annual Middlebury College Peace Symposium on both the local and

national levels. “I have seen how dialogue and story telling can help

bring people together despite boundaries of race, religion, and other

social, economic and political differences,” he said.

Holmberg’s project, “Mapping

Footsteps: Travel Routes of Rural, Highland Communities,” will take

her to Peru, Mongolia and Madagascar. A geography major, she plans to

study and map the design, function, and local significance of

traditional travel routes of isolated, highland settlements. Holmberg

stated in her application to fellowship organizers, “I believe the

most effective and provocative tool to communicate community-scale

patterns of

travel and movement is the map. Maps

speak clearly and directly; they are grounded in the physical

landscape, are accessible across languages and cultures, and can

creatively represent complex lifestyle patterns in a succinct

geographic image.”

Holmberg declared, “Map-making is my

passion … I plan to create hand-drawn maps that represent local

travel routes between villages as well as smaller scale maps of

movement patterns within settlements. I also will collect or document

spatial representations or maps made by villagers

themselves.”

She will spend much of the next year

travelling on foot. According to Holmberg, her devotion to

backpacking stems more from the experience of walking the trails

themselves rather than the thrill of reaching the summit-a

perspective she discovered on a trip to Mount Everest.

Harper’s project, “Exploring the

Diversity of Tropical Frogs,” will offer her the opportunity to study

puzzling declines in amphibian populations in Tanzania, Guyana and

Thailand. “These decreases are occurring all over the world, even in

lush, protected areas,” said Harper. According to her, it is

important to study environmental cues, such as climate changes due to

global warming, because charting such data may hold implications for

humans.

“There is so much yet to be learned

about tropical frogs that the information I could gain in the span of

a year might, in some ways, seem minimal. However, because so little

is known, such data might easily double our existing knowledge of the

frogs in many of these areas,” notes Harper.

The product of her year-long work

will be original data and a host of new questions which she hopes to

answer over the course of her career in the field of herpetology, the

study of amphibians and reptiles. Harper’s long-range goal is to make

this topic more accessible to the greater community outside of the

scientific world through field guides, travel guides, children’s

books and conservation material.

The Watson Fellowship Program was

begun in 1968 by the children of Jeannette K. Watson and her husband

Thomas J. Watson, Jr., the founder of IBM, to honor their parents’

long-standing interest in education and world affairs. The Thomas J.

Watson Foundation selects students based upon each nominee’s

character, academic record, leadership potential, willingness to

delve into another culture, and the personal significance of the

proposed project.

In the history of the foundation,

more than 2,200 Watson Fellows have taken this challenging journey.

They have gone on to become college presidents and professors, chief

executive officers of major corporations, politicians, artists,

lawyers, diplomats, doctors and researchers. “We look for bright,

creative, independently minded individuals who have the personality

and drive to become leaders,” said Tori Haring-Smith, the executive

director of the Watson Foundation and a former Watson Fellow. The

Watson Foundation continues to believe that the investment in Watson

Fellows is an effective contribution to the global

community.

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