Ware first heard of the Goldwater Scholarship, which strives to support undergraduate study and research in natural science, math and engineering, through an event that the Fellowships Office held last semester. He was surprised that he had won, saying, “I applied because I knew that it was a fairly prestigious scholarship that would probably help me apply to grad school and for other fellowships and so forth later on. It wasn’t a very long application, so I thought, ‘Why not? It’s worth a try.’”
Though the application was not complicated, the essay portion was a unique facet that asked applicants to explain an important problem in their fields of study. Ware wrote about the experimental tests of the Bell inequalities which encourage further exploration of the theory of quantum mechanics and alternative, more intuitive theories.
“It’s philosophically and aesthetically very interesting because you’re answering really basic questions like, ‘If there’s a particle in the forest and nobody measures its position, does it still have a position?’” Ware commented. “You want to say, of course it does, but it seems like it probably doesn’t. That’s the kind of thing I’m interested in.”
Ware plans to apply to graduate school in physics and become a professor, blending his interests of research and teaching.
Aba Milki is also directed towards the sciences. Starting late July, he will visit Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa to investigate the efforts of Bush Radio, an HIV awareness program. Then, he plans to journey to Brazil to study the Central Única das Favelas programs — cultural centers that encourage schooling for boys and help them build self-confidence without depending on gang brotherhood. Finally, he intends to travel to northern Uganda to study the Hip-Hop Therapy Project, which decreases the effects of war trauma on youth. He will stay with local hosts and use local transportation to travel, returning after a year. Aba Milki was interested in the Watson Fellowship, which aims to foster global citizenship in college graduates by funding a year’s worth of independent travel outside the U.S., because “the only commonality that [the Watson] projects have is that they are all unique.”
The itinerary sprang from his interests in exploring the different ways in which community health groups of different countries use hip-hop. In collaboration with local health organizations, he will then make a documentary exploring the links between hip-hop and health through interviewing program participants. “The purpose of my travel is to capture what the groups are doing and to present the question, ‘Can we think of health in a different way?’” Aba Milki said. “By challenging the conception of health, we challenge the conception of healing.”
Aba Milki expressed concerns about the technicality of making the documentary and whether the locals would like the work. “You cannot plan a year and people’s response [to the work],” he said. “It’s a new environment with a lot of challenges, both exciting and scary.”
The new environment also offered an opportunity that excited Aba Milki: meeting new people in unfamiliar places while on his own. During his time away from the familiarity of family and friends, he said that he looked forward to meeting public health scholars and hip-hop artists, especially the Brazilian artists MV Bill, Afro Reggae Cultural Group and Emile Jansen, a South African hip-hop artist who conducts workshops for schools.
Aba Milki viewed the travel as a time of reflection as well. “It’s a year’s chance to figure out things in life, whether [I should] go to medical school, school in public health or become a hip-hop artist. Who knows?” he said.