Six receive new $6,000 graduate fellowships

The winners of a new interdisciplinary fellowship have been announced, bringing another tangible result of University President Amy Gutmann's plan to improve Penn's quality.

The GAPSA/Provost's Award for Interdisciplinary Innovation was created in March by the Office of the Provost and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly.

"I'm thrilled by the volume of applicants we had in this inaugural year and by the quality and diversity of the award winners," said Provost Ron Daniels. "The integration of knowledge across disciplines is becoming increasingly vital in almost every major field of study."

Daniels touted the effect the fellowships will have on relations between Penn's 12 schools.

"As evidenced by the depth and breadth of disciplines represented, these fellowships will contribute to an enhanced sense of collaboration and cooperation between scholars and schools," he said.

The six winners of the fellowships include graduate students Amy Bach, Joel M. Caplan, Jonathan A.N. Fisher, Simone Polillo, Katherine V. Sedgiwck and Elaine Wencil.

Projects from these six students range from studies on the effects of freshman hazing at American colleges to the comparison of different banking systems in the United States and Italy and their effect on economies.

The fellowships are designed to foster research across disciplines and includes a $6,000 summer research grant. Work on projects is set to begin in June.

Interdisciplinary education is a key facet of the Penn Compact, University President Amy Gutmann's plan to improve the University.

Noah Drezner, GAPSA's outgoing vice-chair for policy, said that choosing six winners out of 70 was no easy task.

"I was incredibly impressed with the diversity ... and the professionalism of the applications," Drezner said. "We had a lengthy discussion about most of the applications and then there was a lot of debate on how to narrow down to the top six."

Drezner said that the criteria for selection was that the projects include two or more disciplines, be feasible for the completion over the summer and have relevance to the local and global community. He added that preference was given to students who did not already have alternative currently have funding.

The $36,000 required for the six fellowships will be covered by GAPSA and the Provost's Office, each of which will pay half of the sum.

Katherine Sedgwick, a joint Ph.D. candidate in History and Education, was among the winners of the award.

She plans to study the freshman orientation program at her alma mater, Haverford University, because of its unique historical connections to hazing.

That program "began in 1924 and it just started out as a sort of explicit and unashamed hazing program and basically evolved over time into a respected academic socialization program," Sedgwick said, who wants to study how that evolution took place.

Sedgwick said she had mixed emotions after hearing that more applicants had applied than was thought.

"I felt a combination of being glad there were so many applications because that's good for the program itself," she said. "But it did make me wonder if my chances had significantly decreased."

The winners are required to present an end-product of their research at a conference at the end of the summer. According to Drezner, that end-product could be anything from a paper to a presentation to the creation of a small business.

Sedgwick said she is planning to write a paper and present it at a conference in the fall, and then hopefully publish.

Now that she has received the fellowship, she is preparing to begin work on the project.

"I've begun very preliminary work figuring out what my next steps are and will begin my more intensive work within a week or two," Sedgwick said.

Only in its first year, it is unclear whether the fellowships will continue next year -- but with success so far, the future of the fellowship is bright.

"I can't speak for GAPSA but just from unofficial conversations I think that both GAPSA and the Provost's office would like to see these projects continue," Drezner said.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.