I can officially announce today that I have been named a Schwarzman Scholar for the 2021-2022 academic year. The Schwarzman Scholarship is a one-year fully-funded masters program at Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. I will be pursuing a Master of Management Science in Global Affairs with an emphasis in Science and Technology Public Policy. This is an awesome program and I encourage anyone interested to read about the program on their announcement as well as the press release that SMU wrote about the award. 

I began working on my application for several national fellowships last fall with Dr. Rachel Ball-Phillips at SMU, who is the director of SMU's national fellowship office. During this process, I decided to apply for the Schwarzman because it provided two unique opportunities for me: to continue my study of the chinese language in an immersion setting and to pursue a degree that explored how I can use my background in science for communication and policy. I have always been interested in speaking about the role that science plays in society, and I have realized how important it is for future researchers and scientists to understand the policy-making process as well as how to convey science to the public, government officials and corporations. The Schwarzman Scholars Program offers all these opportunities and more and I am so very excited to embark on this adventure next August when I leave for China.