Despite all the turmoil in our nation, on campus, and in many of our personal lives, ONSF students responded with remarkable resilience in Fall 2020.  I am so grateful that I work with inspiring students who have hope and are dedicated to fighting the world’s most important fights through their research, advocacy, and leadership in many different fields.  Here are a few highlights from our fall semester.

Amytess Girgis received the Rhodes Scholarship. Amytess is majoring in Honors Political Science and was an Honors Summer Fellow in the LSA Honors Program.  She has been a prominent student activist on campus for issues such as the One University campaign, LEO and GEO unions, has worked for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, and was social media director for Abdul El-Sayed’s gubernatorial campaign.  Last year Amytess was a finalist for the Truman Scholarship.  Amytess will use the Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a 2-year MPhil in politics at the University of Oxford.  Amytess is U-M’s 28th Rhodes Scholar.

Max Hammer received the Marshall Scholarship.  Max is majoring in Honors Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology with a research thesis in the lab of Prof. Jason Spence in Internal Medicine.  Max was also an Honors Summer Fellow and received the Otto Graf Scholarship last year as one of the top juniors in the LSA Honors Program.  Max is also minoring in philosophy and will use the Marshall Scholarship to pursue a 1-year master’s degree in philosophy of mind at the University of Edinburgh and a 1-year master’s in drug discovery at University College London before returning to the US for his MD-PhD.  Max is U-M’s 11th Marshall Scholars and fourth in the last three years.

Six students and recents alums became Schwarzman Scholars: 

The Schwarzman Scholars Program is a 1-year program in global studies for future leaders at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University in Beijing.  It includes leadership development courses designed and taught by Harvard Business School faculty as well as courses on Chinese language, history and culture, and China’s place in the contemporary world.  These six U-M students will join a cohort of 148 scholars from all around the world.  In the previous five years of the program, U-M only had two scholars selected. Read the full article here.

Looking Ahead to Winter 2021

We hope ONSF will have even more good news to come soon.  We currently have two finalists for the Yenching Academy at Peking University.  We nominated a student for the Michel David Weill Scholarship to study at Sciences Po in Paris.  We’ve nominated three students for James Gaither Fellowships to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  We are in the process of selecting our nominees for the Truman Scholarship, Goldwater, Astronaut, Beinecke and Udall Scholarships.  We have many students with pending applications to programs such as the Gates Cambridge Scholarship and Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford.

We also have many more victories to celebrate than the lucky few who receive these ultra-competitive awards.  For each of the recipients listed above, ONSF has worked with dozens of applicants and nominees. Many of them have already shared good news about their applications to graduate and professional school as well as other programs and job applications outside of ONSF.  Our mission in ONSF advising is to use these scholarship competitions to help all of our students reflect and articulate how their studies and co-curricular activities are preparing them to achieve their goals.

We will soon begin the recruiting cycle for Fall 2021 applications to the programs listed above. If you have outstanding students whom you think might be good candidates, please let us know using the “Refer a Student” button on our ONSF website.