Senior Wins Third Scholarship This Year

For Scot M. Miller ’07, the awards just keep on coming.

The Earth and Planetary Sciences concentrator can now add the prestigious George J. Mitchell Scholarship to his growing resume, which already includes the Truman Scholarship and Udall Scholarship from earlier this year.

The Mitchell Scholarship, sponsored by the US-Ireland Alliance, provides for 12 American citizens under 30 years old to study for a year in Ireland.

Miller hopes this experience will allow him to pursue his environmental activism and studies from a different perspective.

“I think Ireland is a really neat place to be right now,” Miller said. “On the one hand, they’ve committed to Kyoto [Protocol] but on the other their economy is experiencing ridiculous growth. I think reconciling these two things will pose a huge problem for them.”

Miller’s passion for the environment began back home in North Dakota. He said that the devastation caused by the rapid housing development in North Dakota and Minnesota made him “want to work for change.”

“When I got here, I knew environmentalism was something I wanted to work on,” Miller said. “After my freshman year, I worked for an environmental group in D.C. It was interesting but impossible to make substantial change.”

“At Harvard, it’s cool to be able to actually accomplish something.”

Miller’s roommate, John P. Chambers ’07, describes him as “always running from one meeting to another.”

“It’s cool that we can still hang out, though. He knows how to keep his work on the back burner and just have fun, but he also knows how to follow through,” Chambers added.

Miller has been involved in numerous student environmental groups on campus, but cites his work on the renewable energy referendum two years ago as his most rewarding activity.

Miller will spend the year after his graduation working towards his M.A. in environmental sciences at Trinity College Dublin.

While Miller spent much of his undergraduate work on the science behind environmental studies—even going to Tanzania to study deforestation—he plans to eventually go to law school and pursue a career in environmental litigation.