Two students named Gates Scholars

Penn undergraduates have now won every major fellowship available -- in a single academic year.

College senior Amanda Codd and Wharton senior Bartlomiej Szewczyk were named Gates Cambridge Scholars last week, enabling them to study for free at the University of Cambridge for two to three years.

The awards mark the end of a successful first year for the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, which Director Art Casciato said helped Penn bring home the scholarship winners.

"There's never been that sort of embodied presence in the process of the awards that we had this year," Casciato said. "We're not going to win every one, but it's important that we keep what we started this year going. The more Penn students are themselves habituated to applying... the more routine it will be that we win these awards."

Codd and Szewczyk will be among the 160 students at Cambridge with the award, which is in its first year.

Codd will study biochemistry and Szewczyk plans to study international relations. Both of them will be pursuing a Master of Philosophy degree, similar to the master's degree but with a substantial amount of research involved.

Applicants for the Gates Scholarship must already be admitted to Cambridge.

Szewczyk had already won Penn's Thouron Award, which funds an exchange of British and American students, but chose to pursue the Gates as well. The awards cannot be combined.

"The Gates is an international fellowship -- they pick half of their winners from the U.S. and half from the rest of the world," Szewczyk said. "The Thouron fellowship is restricted to Penn... so it's much more local. So obviously [the Gates] gets a lot more recognition for Penn because they're able to have a Gates winner [rather] than someone internally."

Codd said she also appreciates the international dimension of the experience.

"I have never left the States before, so I'm very much looking forward to the traveling, and getting to see the whole world, instead of the tri-state area," Codd said.

Szewczyk, however, has already traveled extensively -- born in Poland, he moved to the U.S. with his family in 1990, when he was 10 years old.

Both Codd and Szewczyk praised the preparation and planning they received from CURF, particularly the mock interviews.

"They gave us some things to look over about what to expect in the interview, some advice on what to talk about, what to avoid talking about," Codd said. "That helped tremendously with the actual interview that I went for in Annapolis, because literally some of the questions they asked in the mock interviews were asked during my interview, things that I wouldn't have thought to have researched."

This past year, Penn has produced winners of the Rhodes, Marshall, Mitchell, Luce, Fulbright and Churchill scholarships, in addition to the Gates.

"To have not one but two Gates Scholars is a wonderful conclusion to an unprecedented year in terms of Penn students winning international honors and awards," Casciato said. "It's important too that Penn students got off to such a fast start in this the first year of this particular award. In a sense, Amanda and Bart will have the opportunity to define who a Gates Cambridge Scholar is."

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