(01/27/16 5:03pm)
Recent graduate Rana Abdelhamid ’15, a current Truman Scholar and Pickering Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, was recently featured by the Associated Press, BBC News, and Elle Magazine for her organization, the Women’s Initiative for Self-Empowerment, or WISE.
After being accosted for wearing a headscarf in her hometown of New York City when she was 16, Abdelhamid was inspired to reach out to other young Muslim women and develop this program. The WISE program, which she began at age 17, emphasizes the promotion of self-defense, entrepreneurship and leadership skills.
“[WISE] is really all about empowering other people so they feel like they have the tools, the skills and resources to be able to make a difference,” said Abdelhamid in a video series put forth by the College covering young alumni solving pressing global issues.
As an International Politics and Economics major at the College, Abdelhamid’s studies greatly influenced her future goals for WISE. “As a political science student, I’ve seen how to leverage economic systems to empower disenfranchised communities,” said Abdelhamid in the video. “In seeing that, I wanted to use WISE as a space where these young Muslim women can gain the skills that they need to be able to access these different economic institutions.”
While at the College, Abdelhamid worked with Jonathan Isham, Professor of Economics and Director for the Center of Social Entrepreneurship (CSE), along with other members of the CSE to develop a 100-page course outline that would become the basis for WISE’s basic program, Mentee Muslimah. The 13-session program is taught to around 50 13-17 year-old women in Manhattan each summer. Abdelhamid used the skills she learned from the CSE, like sustainability and scalability, as well as a grant from the Center to expand her vision for WISE.
“What makes Rana really unique that we saw in her is that this is an issue that is connected to her identity and it drives her all the time,” said Heather Neuwirth ’08, Associate Director of the Center for Social Entrepreneurship, in the Associated Press article published Dec. 31. “She took what could have been an experience that could have shut her down, she really realized the power in that and I think the way that she connects to others is deeply caring.”
Over the past five years, WISE has educated hundreds of young women and has grown rapidly. WISE now has chapters in Union City, New Jersey, Washington, Dallas, Madrid and Edinburg. Abdelhamid is planning on developing programs in Chicago, Dublin and Istanbul. She has also taken steps to increase the program’s scope to include women of other religions.
Abdelhamid said in an article on the genUN website, “Whether it’s through involvement with the [United Nations Association of the United States of America] or with a local community organization, our time to make change, as youth, is right now and we have so many tools to do so.”
(03/04/15 8:00pm)
For the 2014-2015 grant year, Middlebury was ranked sixth on the Fulbright U.S. Student Program Top Producing Institutions list for liberal arts colleges with 12 recipients, a College record. These numbers were likely higher than past years due to an increase in application volume, according to Associate Dean for Fellowships and Research Lisa Gates.
Yearly applications from Middlebury students have tripled, from 13 applicants in 2008 to almost 40 in 2014. This year, Middlebury had about 10 fewer applications.
On Middlebury’s success last year, Gates said, “It’s about increasing the pool; it’s about getting more students interested in applying and doing that work. That’s really the secret … We’re getting more students who are strongly motivated to do this and have good, relevant experience, whether it’s in the realm of teaching, tutoring, mentoring or research. We’re getting more students interested in applying, and that will, over time, increase the number of successful grantees we get.”
Gates went on to remark that because many Middlebury students choose to study abroad, their experiences prepare them well for the realities of a Fulbright.
“Students also spend time abroad through Middlebury programs where they are very much challenged to integrate into the host culture. It’s a highly immersive experience and I think our students take that very seriously.” She added that taking classes in a host university and doing research in a second language “are extremely important experiences in terms of preparing students to be successful in preparing for a Fulbright because they’ve done something similar at a smaller scale,” she said.
Hannah Postel ’13 looked at the Fulbright Program as an opportunity to further her studies and pursue an interest in international development. She traveled to Zambia after graduation to study the Chinese migration there.
“[The Fulbright] helped me to push beyond what I had learned into something I was very interested in but was too narrow to be taught at school… While I spent most of my time on my own research (interviews, compiling a dataset of visa records from the immigration department, archival work, etc.) I also interned part-time with the research NGO Innovations for Poverty Action to make the most of my time in-country and learn more about pure development work,” Postel wrote in an email.
Both Gates and Postel urged students to apply to the program if they have even the slightest interest. “[The Fulbright Program] is an incomparable opportunity. It doesn’t hurt to apply. While it’s definitely a competitive process, the application is actually not that long and involved, and most decisions are made on a country-by-country basis,” Postel said.
The Fulbright program was created by the U.S. Congress in 1946 “to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges” and is as prestigious as it is competitive – thousands of U.S. students and scholars compete for the roughly 2,800 grants designated for U.S. citizens.