Two Brown seniors, Kingston Reif '05 and Ryan Roark '05, have been selected for prestigious Marshall Scholarships.
The scholarship winners will not be formally announced until early December, but Reif and Roark said they were notified earlier this week of their selections. The scholarships allow U.S. college graduates to study at any university in the United Kingdom for two years toward a Master's degree.
Candidates must enter the competition from one of eight regions; they must live or study in the region from which they enter. If a student's application is chosen, he or she participates in a final interview, after which applicants are notified of their acceptance.
At least 40 scholarships are awarded each year. Last year, there were no recipients from Brown. There were between 800 and 1,000 applications for the minimum 40 spots this year, according to Reif.
Roark, who will graduate in May with a triple concentration in mathematics, biology and comparative literature with a focus in literary translation, was informed of her selection Monday morning.
"It was actually early when they called, and they woke me up so I wasn't doing cartwheels or anything, but I was really excited," she said.
For her Marshall program, Roark will study oncology at Cambridge University, and she plans to apply for a third year so she can get her doctorate. She said she would like to become a cancer researcher after graduating, and she is considering writing books on cancer as well. Her first lab work at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, which was based in cancer research, put her on her current track, she said.
Roark is currently working on two theses, one translating the 16th-century French novel "La Mariane du Fillmené," and the other based on her research at Southwestern. She volunteers at the Hope Center for Cancer in her spare time, and is an editor-in-chief of the Catalyst.
After her first year at the University, Roark transferred to Harvard, but she spent only a semester there before coming back to Brown. She said she realized Brown gave her the freedom to study multiple concentrations in the five-year A.B.-Sc.B. program, something Harvard could not offer.
Reif, an international relations concentrator, is planning to continue within that discipline at the London School of Economics. He said he was "flabbergasted" when he heard he had been awarded a scholarship. He said he is interested in studying in the "English school" theoretical approach to international relations, which attempts to synthesize the approaches of the three main schools of thought within international relations - realism, liberalism and constructivism. The lead scholars in the English school are at LSE, which is why it was his first choice.
Reif also keeps busy outside the classroom. He is a member of the College Democrats and Brown Model UN, plays intramural basketball and football, works at the Watson Institute and has been a guest columnist for The Herald.
Reif said he has considered getting into policy after he finishes at LSE. "I'm very interested in the State Department," he said. "That's probably the route I will go unless I really love what I'm studying, in which case I might stay in the academy, but probably not."
- With additional reports by Dana Goldstein
