Three UMass Amherst students have won prestigious national scholarships.
Kunal Malhotra, Matt Marzilli, and John Debardeleben recently learned that they were selected from among thousands of applicants to receive respectively a Truman Scholarship and Goldwater Scholarships.
Malhotra is one of 75 undergraduates, including students from MIT, Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, Stanford, and Harvard, to be awarded the Truman Scholarship, a federally funded memorial to the U.S. president. The Truman provides $30,000 for graduate study in preparation for careers in government or other areas of public service. Nearly 600 students, in the top quarter of their class, submitted a 10-page application; 200 or so finalists were interviewed by a panel in Washington, D.C. last February.
Susan Whitbourne, professor of psychology and director of the Office of National Scholarship Advisement (ONSA) on campus, heads up a team of faculty members who help students apply for these and other prestigious, highly competitive awards and grants such as the Marshall and Rhodes Scholarships.
“I had help every step of the way,” Malhotra says. Political science professor John Brigham worked particularly closely with Malhotra on his application. Malhotra says the two mock panel interviews led by Whitbourne were also invaluable for “figuring out what I knew and didn’t know.” He says it made all the difference when he had his real, rigorous interview in the Dolley Madison House in Washington. One Truman Scholarship panelist, Malhotra recalled, grilled him about just one sentence of his application.
A political science major with an economics minor, Malhotra says, “political science is a great avenue to explore a wide array of topics.” He is looking into graduate programs through which one earns a law degree and a master’s in public policy simultaneously. Eventually he’d like to specialize in public-interest law, with a focus on environmental and energy matters, toward promoting constructive collaboration between scientists and politicians. As legislative director of the UMass Amherst chapter of MassPIRG, he has already worked with state lawmakers. He sees a role for himself someday as someone “who connects people on issues where they may not see things the same way.”
Truman Scholars commit themselves to five to seven years of public service after graduate school, which Malhotra thinks is a great idea: “It’s about the pursuit of excellence, in a grander sense, one that goes beyond the personal.”
This year 1,081 mathematics, science, and engineering students in the U.S. were nominated by their colleges and universities for the Goldwater Scholarships honoring the late United States Senator from Arizona. The Goldwater Foundation awards one- and two-year scholarships on the basis of academic merit, to cover the cost of undergraduate tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year. Of the four students nominated by UMass Amherst, two won scholarships—Matt Marzilli ’07 and John Debardeleben ’07—and one, Melissa M. St. Amand, a chemical engineering/biochemistry major, received an Honorable Mention. Marzilli says that when he saw his name among the 323 scholarship winners on the Goldwater Foundation’s Web site, “I was refreshing it every two seconds,” just to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. Debardeleben was similarly elated by the news: “I was extremely lucky and so many people helped me. It all fell into place from the very first step.”
Marzilli, from Westport, Massachusetts, is double-majoring in computer science and physics. Last summer, while holding a full-time physics research position, he also worked in the computer science department’s Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER) on a project for the National Mediation Board. His contribution was helping to create STORM, a prototype of a computer negotiation intermediary. This summer, he’ll be working on embedded digital systems and super and parallel computing research as an intern at MIT’s renowned Lincoln Laboratory.
With a double-major in physics and astronomy, John Debardeleben has had as his goal to be a physicist, but just recently he’s been considering a career in medicine and will be preparing this summer to take the MCAT. This semester, he’s working on an independent study project with physics professor Mark Tuominen. Debardeleben’s experiment will investigate how protons move through nanopores—and become his senior honors thesis project. Debardeleben spent last summer as an intern at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), a national center for plasma and fusion science. He’s attracted by the practical applications of the research he’s been involved in, as it relates to energy, but he also finds medicine attractive because “it’s direct—you can have a positive, personal impact on people.”
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UMass Amherst Office of National Scholarship Advisement