14 ‘New Americans’ Receive Funding

Former and current Harvard students make up 14 of the 30 recipients of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships For New Americans, which award funding for two years of graduate study in the United States to immigrants or children of immigrants.

The 2006 fellows come from countries as diverse as Peru, Taiwan, Greece, Cuba, and Russia, and study a wide spectrum of topics ranging from bioengineering to government to English.

These fellows are members of a group known as “New Americans,” a demographic that Warren Ilchman, director of the Soros Fellowships, characterizes as representing “a unique window on very important phenomena in contemporary American life.”

The fellows exemplify “the creative and constructive side of immigration” during a time “when many are raising questions about the value of immigration,” the program’s press release reads.

The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship For New Americans was created in 1997 by American philanthropists Paul and Daisy Soros, themselves immigrants from Hungary, as a way to make a significant contribution to their adopted country. By ensuring opportunities for higher education for immigrants and their children, the program helps equip fellows to be “leaders in their fields,” according to Ilchman.

The program aims to “remind people that immigration makes a positive impact,” he said. “People will realize that you can have laws that keep immigrants out, but you will also keep the Yo-Yo Ma’s out.”

A 2006 fellow, Vipin Narang, a Ph.D candidate in Government at Harvard, said that the program helps fellows “figure out how to contribute back to the US and also to their home countries, but mostly to America—we are New Americans.”

Over the past nine years, thirty men and women annually have been selected from an extremely competitive pool. In this year’s round, the program considered nearly eight hundred applicants for the thirty fellowships, which award up to $36,000 per year.

Past recipients include authors of 25 books, owners of 21 patents, three composers of work premiered by leading orchestras this year, and 31 clerks for federal judges, four on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of this year’s thirty fellows, 14 have Harvard ties, as either graduates of the College or current students at one of the graduate schools. Ilchman attributes the high rate of Harvard-affiliated students among the fellows to several factors.

According to Ilchman, Harvard’s pool has already undergone a rigorous selection process.

The university also does a “very good” job of letting students know about opportunities like the Soros Fellowship, he said.

And Harvard students generally garner good letters of recommendation. “You’ll get a three page letter from a senior tutor in Lowell House,” an advantage not readily available at many other large institutions, Ilchman added.

Medicine and law are the most highly represented fields among the total body of Fellows, with 29% and 23% respectively pursuing these subjects. Ilchman said that “these are the fields that have the least amount of financial support…you have to self-invest.”

Susan Mathai ’05, a 2006 fellow and student at Yale Medical School, wrote in an e-mail that the fellowship “meets a critical need” because it enables recipients to “pursue projects and jobs that you consider important” while avoiding the high burden of debt.

Theodore C. Marentis, another 2006 fellow who is currently studying at the Harvard/MIT Health Science & Technology Program, said he already had plans for the projects he will pursue after he has used his fellowship.

Marentis said that once he is a physician, he hopes to organize seminars in his home country of Greece or exchanges in which Greek doctors and students can learn about the medical system in the United States.

And the Soros Fellowships may just help make these “new Americans” feel more at home.

“An amazing amount of opportunity has opened up for me. I’m thinking about staying longer in the United States,” Marentis said.

The other Harvard-affiliated Soros Fellows are Deema Arafah, Alvaro Bedoya, Amit Bouri, Susie Huang, Paul Kwak, Elizabeth Kwo, Darryl Li, Sze-Ling Ng, Antonio Perez, Yulia Ryzhik, and Colette Shen.

The program has 172 alumni and 60 students currently participating.