The Thouron Award, given to Penn students, will be paying for four of this year's seniors to study for up to two years at a British university of their choice.
The Thouron Award, which was established in 1960, is an exchange program in which British students are also funded to study at Penn. According to the Director of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships Art Casciato, the Thouron family established it in order to promote social and cultural exchange between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Thouron winner and College senior Jake Kraft said he will probably go to Oxford University next year to study social anthropology.
Kraft, a French and international relations major, became interested in culture and anthropology while studying abroad in France.
"What I am interested in is cultural preservation... how to preserve art and physical culture in the developing world," Kraft said, adding that he wanted to study how traditions are disappearing because of globalization.
College senior Rya Conrad-Bradshaw is planning on studying for her master's in contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art next year. Conrad-Bradshaw, an art history major, has been interested in art since high school, and would like to eventually work in a museum.
"I want to work in the public sector of the art world," she said.
Wharton senior Madhan Gounder said that next year he will either study politics at Oxford or public policy at the London School of Economics. Gounder, who has concentrations in management and public policy, said he does not know exactly what he wants to do after he finishes his studies in Britain.
And Engineering senior Tevis Jacobs will be studying at Churchill College at Cambridge University for his master's of philosophy in material science engineering.
After his year in Cambridge, Jacobs is planning on studying for his Ph.D. in material science engineering at Stanford University, where he has already been accepted.
"I never got a chance to study abroad as an undergraduate, and it's something I really wanted to do. I think I will get a lot out of it, not just classes and a degree, but experiences," Jacobs said, adding that he thinks he wants to be a professor.
Jacobs and the other three winners said that the application process for the Thouron Award is very intense, but it is also a wonderful experience.
"We had a written application that asked us about our plans for next year... and an all-day interview in early February," Conrad-Bradshaw said.
Gounder said that the finalists attended a 13-hour interview session at a hotel in Center City, where they were interviewed by past Thouron winners and members of the Thouron family.
"It is a pretty full day, but the idea is to really get to know" the finalists and feel confident in the ones they pick, Gounder said.
"Just the application process itself has been a wonderful experience," Kraft said, praising the Thouron committee members for taking the time to really get to know the finalists.
Once the Penn students are chosen to be a finalists, they must apply to British universities.
This year, five British students also received the Thouron Award and will be coming to Penn next year to study.
Past Thouron Award winners have studied at Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, the University of Sussex and many other British universities.
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