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Passionate dedication to education the hallmark of Case, Melville, Trustee Scholars
By Brian Fitzgerald
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| At the Case, Melville, and Trustee Scholarship awards ceremony: (top row, from left) Vineet Prabhu, Richard Malins, Bradley Irish, Matthew Merendo, and Gobind Singh; (middle row) Heather Hanson, Anna Winestein, Heidi Fransen, Elizabeth Chalmers, and Adam Bravo; (bottom row) Provost Dennis Berkey, Robert Horacek, Daniel Hernández, Julia Gefter, Adam Gitner, Tracey Madsen, and Chancellor John Silber. Not pictured are Emma Runyan and Sara Sitzer. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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Since high school, Heather Hanson has wanted to pursue a career helping children with disabilities. Although there is a plethora of ways to do this, an internship in London last year strongly reinforced the Melville Scholar’s decision to study physical therapy.
“In the London Internship Study Abroad Program, I worked for the pediatric occupational therapy department that was based at the Royal Free Hospital, one of England’s National Health Service hospitals,” says Hanson (SAR’04). “This was done in a variety of settings -- the hospital, schools, and homes, and it has added a lot to my education, especially in terms of practical experiences and widening my horizons.”
Hanson was among 17 students recently honored with one of the three highest awards given by BU to recognize undergraduate achievement. Faculty committees select the winners of the annual Case, Melville, and Trustee scholarships on the basis of both academic performance and community involvement.
“Miss Hanson does it all,” said Provost Dennis Berkey at the scholarship awards ceremony, held at The Castle on April 26. “She is an accomplished student, a peer counselor at Sargent College, and a volunteer for numerous groups, including Project Respite Care, Winners on Wheels, and the Big Siblings Program.”
Hanson is also involved in other activities on campus, including the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and the Student Evangelical Council, and has volunteered for the Community Service Center. While she admits that sometimes it is a challenge for her to balance all of these endeavors with academics, “these are the things that make me tick. If it weren’t for my extracurricular activities, academic work would be much more tedious, and not as fun.” She also has a little help. “I’ve learned,” she says, “to just trust that God will provide me with enough time and energy for everything I’m involved in.”
Melville Scholars
The Melville Scholarships were established in 1978 in honor of the late Elsbeth Melville (CAS’25), longtime BU dean of women. Each year they are presented to two junior women who exemplify excellence of scholarship, high moral character and personal dignity, contribution to the life of BU, and potential in their chosen fields.
Besides Hanson, this year’s other Melville Scholar is Julia Gefter (CAS’04), a psychology major whose academic focus is the socialization of adolescent girls. Gefter, who has a passion for literature, writing poetry, and social activism, is a member of the Poetry Fanatics, Boston University Literary Society, BU Students for a Free Tibet, Speak Easy, and the Community Service Center’s Children’s Theater. She also volunteers at the Elizabeth Stone House in Boston, offering assistance to women in transition. A faculty recommendation states: “She has not devoted time to these activities to make her résumé look better, but out of deep moral commitment. We are fortunate to have such a fine person at Boston University.”
Case Scholars
The Harold C. Case Scholarships, honoring the University’s fifth president (1950-1967), were established in 1967. The tenure of Case (GRS’27) marked BU’s transformation from a commuter school to a university where the majority of students live on or near the campus. Each year the scholarships are awarded to at least 10 juniors who exhibit great scholarly accomplishment and potential, as well as participate in extracurricular activities that contribute to the University.
Case Scholar Vineet Prabhu (CAS’04), a biochemistry and molecular biology major, “is much more than a student of science,” said Berkey. “He is a gifted young man who finds passion equally in his research on proteins and in playing and studying classical music.” The past recipient of a CAS Distinguished Sophomore Award and recent winner of a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, Prabhu is interested in understanding how signals move within a cell to communicate with the outside of a cell. “I’ve always liked biology in general,” he says, “and I’ve always been fascinated with research on what’s happening within cells -- the various mechanisms, pathways, and signals that are involved in their basic functioning.”
But Prabhu is quick to deflect praise, crediting his academic advisor, CAS Biology Professor Thomas Gilmore, “as being instrumental in my modest academic successes thus far.”
Also receiving Case scholarships are Adam Bravo (CAS’04), whose majors are classics and economics; Elizabeth Chalmers (ENG’04), a mechanical engineering major; Heidi Fransen (CAS’04, COM’04), whose majors are political science and journalism; mechanical engineering major Robert Horacek (ENG’04); biology major Tracy Madsen (CAS’04); Richard Malins (CAS’04), who is majoring in chemistry and psychology; English major Emma Runyan (CAS’04); Gobind Singh (CAS’04), a chemistry major; and Anna Winestein (CFA’04, CAS’04), whose majors are art history, economics, and painting.
Trustee Scholars
The Trustee Scholarship program, which was begun in 1975, offers merit-based, full-tuition scholarships to high school seniors. In 1996, President Emeritus Jon Westling expanded the program to include students who have distinguished themselves during their first three terms at the University.
Adam Gitner (UNI’05), a Latin and Greek scholar majoring in classics, had no trouble making his intellectual impact felt immediately at BU, receiving the Edmonds Prize his freshman year for a paper entitled, “Propertius, Trauma, and Modernity.” Sextus Propertius, who lived from about 50 b.c. to 16 b.c., is a relatively obscure Latin poet with a reputation for not being easy to read because his work is heavily loaded with mythological references. But Gitner says that the effort to fully understand him is worth it. “I’ve always enjoyed the way he can move from kitschy love to comedy to pathos to realism and back again,” he says. “It’s kind of a polyphony.”
Although Propertius is regarded as the most psychological of the Roman poets, Gitner says, he is so labeled “because during the Dark Ages, an amazingly poor job was done copying his manuscripts, and consequently some poems are so badly scrambled that they’re a sort of Rorschach test for whoever is reading them. Also, he writes about love and death, which fit a bit too neatly into psychoanalytic categories.”
With Gitner’s dedication to whatever subject he pursues, it’s no wonder that UNI Professor and BU’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities Rosanna Warren describes him as “the most gifted undergraduate I have taught in the 22 years of my teaching life.”
The other sophomore Trustee Scholarship recipients are Daniel Hernández
(ENG’05); Bradley Irish (UNI’05), an English and Latin major;
Matthew Merendo (CAS’05), who is majoring in biochemistry, molecular
biology, and English; and Sara Sitzer (CFA’05), a cello performance
major.
14
May 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations