Two Juniors Win Truman Scholarship

After participating in a rigorous application process, two College students have been awarded the prestigious Truman Scholarship, which provides $30,000 to college juniors for graduate study in fields related to public service.

Sarah S. Burg ’04 and Ganesh N. Sitaraman ’04 were among the 76 students—out of 635 candidates nationwide—who were identified by the foundation as possessing “exceptional leadership potential...in government.”

Applicants were informed of the competition’s results just before spring break.

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 e-mailed the students on March 21 with the subject line “Good News” after they did not answer their room phones.

Sitaraman, who said he started working on his application in September, said that even before he opened the e-mail he knew what it was about.

“I was pretty happy when I saw the e-mail,” he said. “I knew immediately I had gotten it.”

Burg had left for Paris the day that Lewis sent out the e-mail and said she did not heard the news until she called her parents at 3:00 a.m. one morning last week.

She said she was “unbelievably excited” when she found out.

“It was a fantastic moment,” Burg wrote in an e-mail.

She said that when she first applied, she thought her chances of winning were “remote” because of the quality of the Harvard applicant pool.

The Truman Foundation allows up to four college juniors to be nominated from any four-year institution in the United States.

A total of 305 institutions participated in this year’s competition, and 63 had winners.

The procedure for applying for the award at Harvard requires students to submit the complete Truman Scholarship application to the Office of Career Services in November. A committee then narrows down the pool and conducts interviews before choosing its four nominees.

The application consists of three recommendations, as well as several personal essays and a policy proposal.

Burg’s policy proposal discussed how to “reduce recidivism among minority youth offenders” in Massachusetts, while Sitaraman proposed the creation of “an international coalition to prevent catastrophic nuclear terrorism.”

Burg said that she will go to law school but is unsure about whether she will take time off after graduating from college. Sitaraman said he is interested in pursing a doctorate in international relations at either Oxford University or Cambridge University.

Both Burg and Sitaraman are government concentrators and Crimson editors.

Each year, two to three of Harvard’s four nominees receive the award, according to Paul A. Bohlmann, director of fellowships at the Office of Career Services.

All recipients will attend an awards ceremony at the Truman Library in Missouri on May 25.