Three Macalester students received prestigious awards the week before spring break. Jane Turk ’02 and Owen Kohl ’02 each received Thomas J. Watson fellowships. Andy Cantrell ’02 was granted a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

The Watson fellowship is awarded each year. Two Macalester students have received a Watson fellowship in each of the three years Macalester has participated in the project. This year nearly 1,000 students from 50 colleges applied for the award and only 60 students were selected.

Each fellow receives a $22,000 grant and is reimbursed the sum of one year’s payment of outstanding federal loans. The fellowship provides for one year of study that must be conducted independently of formal academic institutions and outside of the student’s home country.

“The Watson Fellowship is intended to be a time when fellows are their own advisors,” according to the Watson Web site. “The fellow should decide how questions can be answered, when it is time to move on and if a project must be adjusted in any way.”

Turk, who is a communication studies major, will be studying publicly funded broadcasting outlets throughout Europe and Asia. She will be visiting England, Germany, Czech Republic, Romania, Russia, China and Japan. As a three year World Press Institute employee, Turk has met many international journalists, some of whom she will be in contact with.

“From the U.S. perspective, the concept of government-funded media has an air of propaganda and monolithic ideology.” Turk said. “I just don’t think it’s that simple. ‘Press freedom’ is a very slippery concept, and I want to see how journalists and citizens interact with information in general in historically non-commercial media systems.” After her fellowship, Turk will attend New York University’s Media Ecology M.A. program.

Kohl is a German Studies and Russian double major and a history minor. He will compare and contrast hip-hop on the urban periphery and at the center of the former French empire and Soviet-bloc. His travels will include Paris; Dakar, Senegal; Zagreb, Croatia; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; and Moscow.

“A lot of work is being produced on the U.S. scene, but little focus is given to the music and art that is being produced within this genre all over the world,” said Kohl. “I would like to make everything from a documentary on Senegalese beatboxers to a photography exhibit on Mongolian breakdance. Everything is possible.”

Kohl plans to attend graduate school for history after he completes his Watson fellowship.

Last year’s fellows have already embarked on their studies. Annemarie Ackerman is studying photography in five countries and Melanie Gipp is studying medicinal folklore in Brazil and Argentina.

The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship was awarded to 900 students, 35 for the study of mathematics. The fellowship provides an exemption from tuition and fees at any U.S. university and a Graduate Research Fellow stipend for three years. The stipend next year will be $22,000. The program also offers a one-time international research travel allowance. NSF fellows are expected to contribute significantly to research and education in science, mathematics and engineering.

Cantrell is currently working with algebraic combinatorics and hopes to continue his current work while “experiencing as many as possible of the wonderful and beautiful things mathematics has to offer.” He has been accepted to Yale and the University of Wisconsin-Madison next year and is also interested in pursuing a semester in Russia at some point.

The nature of the NSF grant gives Cantrell the freedom to study where he wants without regard to financial factors.

“I fell really good about the GRF program,” said Cantrell. “They have a really wonderful vision of what a grad school should be and they give their fellows the resources to shape their grad school experiences according to their needs and desires.” In addition, Cantrell’s honors thesis will be published in the Journal of Communatorial Theory.