The Selection Process

For the 2008 round, there were about 700 applications from 257 undergraduate and 123 graduate institutions. Candidates applied from the whole spectrum of graduate fields -- professional and academic, from creative writing and voice to medicine and neuroscience. They represented 136 different national origins, an astonishing number when it is realized that there are only 190 countries in the United Nations! Not only did they hail from 136 different national origins, but many represented oppressed minorities -- Hmong, Mien, Chaldeans, Jews, Armenians, Overseas Chinese, Overseas Indians, Parsees, Copts, Baha'is, Ismalis, Melkite Christians, etc., etc.

On this website under "Current Fellows," the 323 individuals who received the Fellowship are briefly profiled. It may be helpful, however, to look at profiles below of five Fellows so that potential applicants can see the range of backgrounds and career trajectories successful Fellows have.

Pakou Hang , born in 1976, is a doctoral student in political science at University of Minnesota at Twin Cities. She completed her BA in political science at Yale University in 1999. Between her graduation from Yale and her beginning the doctoral program, Pakou spent two years in Boston as a research analyst with KLD Research and Analytics, a firm advising socially responsible investments. Born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand but now naturalized as an American citizen, Pakou is a member of the Hmong community and came to the US with her family, first settling in Providence, Rhode Island, and later, in St. Paul, Minnesota, where they still live. Active in politics, Pakou served as a deputy political director to Senator Paul Wellstone and campaign manager in the election of Mee Moua to the Minnesota legislature. She has also been active in the nonprofit civic organization Progressive Minnesota and in the University-based Jane Addams School for Democracy and its efforts to engage immigrants in local and state issues important to them. In 2003, she received the Hubert H. Humphrey Public Leadership Award from the University of Minnesota. At Minnesota and afterwards, she plans to move between formal study of political strategy and the active engagement of the immigrant population.

Babacar Cisse is a third year student in the MD/PhD program at the College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University. He received his BA in chemistry from Bard College, where he won an National Institute of Health Undergraduate Scholarship, a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Fellowship, and the Reamer Kline Award, given to Bard undergraduates who contribute significantly to the vitality of the college. As a physician, he wants to help those in his immediate surroundings in America; as a research scientist; he hopes his future work will have penetrating effects both here in the US and abroad. Babacar has also been a big brother for orphans from the Hudson region. He immigrated to New York with the dream of attaining a higher education and won the green-card lottery. He was born in 1974 and lives in New York City, while his wife and family remain in Dakar, Senegal.

Monica Santana Rosen is a first-generation Dominican American and was born in 1976. She is a graduate of Harvard Business School. After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1997, Monica joined the Tiger Foundation, assisting nonprofits working to break the cycle of poverty in New York City. She later served as executive director for Management Leadership for Tomorrow, working to increase minority leadership across sectors. Monica is presently on the board of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, which offers educational retreats for women. Monica's parents both emigrated from the Dominican Republic. The youngest of four children, Monica was born and raised in New York City. Adhering to her parents' belief in a solid education, Monica's long-term aspiration is to develop a program offering academic enrichment and financial literacy to young children and their parents.

Van Tran, a summa cum laude graduate of Hunter College of the City University of New York where he majored in sociology, is in his fourth year of the PhD program in Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was born in 1979 in Ho Chi Minh City and came to the United States as a refugee in 1998. His family settled in the Bronx, where they still live. Van is a naturalized citizen. After immigrating, he worked at Wankel's, a 109-year-old hardware store in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he was responsible for hiring and training, and advanced to the position of vice president. His academic interests include international migration, racial and ethnic studies, urban communities and social stratification. He has studied the Tibetan refugee community in New York City as well as shifts in American immigration policy from 1924 to 1965. His current research focuses on how the end of bilingual education in Massachusetts in 2002 is impacting working-class immigrant children and their families.

Nneoma Nwogu holds a JD from the University of Michigan Law School. She also completed a Development Studies degree at St Antony's College, Oxford where she earned a distinction in her MPhil thesis on Justice, Sectarian Politics, and the (Re)making of Memory. Nneoma graduated cum laude in 2002 with a BA in philosophy and Africana studies from Wellesley College. While there, she successfully completed a thesis in both of her majors and received dual honors. As the president of Students for Development in Oxford University, she organized an England-wide conference on post-conflict development. As an undergraduate, she served as a court advocate for victims of domestic violence in the Worcester District Court and co-founded a summer leadership program for Nigerian students. Nneoma has been honored for her academic papers at Wellesly and Oxford with the Ella Smith Prize and the St Antony's Callaway Prize, respectively. A creative writer, she has published two of her poems in Wellesley's Open World and she received the Agnes Perkins Prize for Creative Writing. She co-founded Slice () Mango, a literary collective of writers working in non-canonical literary traditions at the University of Oxford. Nneoma is a naturalized US citizen and plans a career in International Law. She is an associate at Hogan & Hartson in Washington, DC.