David Rockefeller International Experience Grants Program
From its roots as a project of Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), several hundred Harvard students have gone abroad and served in education in developing countries as WorldTeach volunteers. You can read about our history of service and our present efforts in a feature article in Harvard Magazine.
Every year, several area-studies centers partner with WorldTeach to offer fully-funded fellowships to Harvard College undergraduates. This year, generous funding for Harvard Center Fellowships (HCF) will be provided by our partners at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) and the Committee on African Studies (CAS).
Harvard Center Fellowships are available for the following programs:
HCF applicants should concurrently apply for funding through the new David Rockefeller International Experience GrantsProgram, administered through the Office of International Programs (OIP). This fund was established to give students the opportunity to gain a broader understanding of the world beyond the U.S. or their home country, and to learn about other countries and peoples by spending time immersed in another culture.
Students who do not receive a Harvard Center Fellowship can still be accepted into a WorldTeach program and receive a David Rockefeller International Experience Grant; therefore, we strongly encourage you to complete the separate OIP application as well.
3. Mail or hand-deliver your application to our office by the appropriate deadline. Please note that our office is not located at our mailing address, but on the fifth floor of the One Brattle Square building, next to Brattle Theater and Café Algiers.
Friday, February 12 @ 5:00PM is the deadline for all applications
4. (optional) Separately submit a complete application for this summer's Rockefeller Grants to the Office of International Programs (OIP), located at 77 Dunster Street, by the deadline of Friday, February 12.
Funding for Rockefeller Grants can be used toward all summer programs.
note: since WorldTeach programs are all-inclusive, you can simply list the respective program fee of US$3,990, US$,4,490 or US$5,490, instead of individually itemizing costs for airfare, room, board, and other expenses
300-word proposal that describes the WorldTeach program you selected, and how it fits into your personal/academic/career plans
unofficial transcript
copy of email from WorldTeach confirming program application
Please write to us at admissions@worldteach.org with "Harvard Center Fellowships" in the subject line if you have any questions. We look forward to receiving and reviewing your applications for this summer!
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Information Sessions
Come learn more about WorldTeach programs and funding options!
We will hold a panel discussion on January 28th at 4:00 pm in the Office of Career Services.
At the session, we will describe the experience and benefits of serving in WorldTeach programs, explain the admissions process, and provide the opportunity to ask questions of returned WorldTeach volunteers. We hope to see you there!
Information sessions specifically for the Rockefeller Grants:
Information Sessions: Tues. Jan. 26, 6:30-7:30pm (OCS Reading Room) and Wed. Feb. 3, 4:30-5:30pm (OCS Conference Room)
Drop-in Hours:Weekdays Jan. 25-Feb. 11 at OCS (1-3pm) and OIP (2-4pm)
I’ve never been closed-minded toward new possibilities. On the contrary, it has always been perhaps the fundamental principle of mine to be constantly open to (and seek out) things that I don’t yet understand—to whatever possibilities of thought may lie around the corner of my perception. Nevertheless, no one wanders through life aimlessly, being open to everything equally with no underlying plan. One adopts first principles for a specific purpose, and mine was decidedly to avoid deception and blindness on my overall path toward finally getting some answers to questions that plagued me about human nature and existence.
Not surprisingly, then, I turned to science, philosophy, and the classics from early on—the fields of study that seemed to be asking the biggest existential questions, while still in a rigorous way. Originally planning to do a joint concentration in Physics and Philosophy, I always knew I wanted to travel ‘on the side’ (mostly to Europe)—but never thought of traveling to a developing country as a significant or even relevant part of my Harvard education. I never gave much thought to people who go off and spend great amounts of time and energy doing social activism (volunteering, Peace Corps, etc.) abroad. Of course I respected their work, but sort of as one might respect the work of a city council member or a businessman—I thought, that’s just not my personality, that’s not the kind of thing I would like to do with my time.
Nevertheless, driven by a vague feeling that something had been missing all my life and that I was only now starting to realize it, my sophomore spring I found myself applying to be a WorldTeach volunteer in Namibia. At first I couldn’t explain it to myself—I felt like a fish out of water. How on earth can Namibia and hands-on development work relate to my interests (and future thesis) in Philosophy? Yet somehow I felt this was important. This paradox was to plague me for a good several months after I returned to Harvard from Namibia with my soul on fire, imprinted and transformed by what had been the three most ecstatic months of my life. Resolving and coming to terms with this tension during this past year has been the most exciting and satisfying stage of my education—a year of personal growth and discovery that I could never have foreseen or imagined, although it’s just what I always wanted and more.
I went to Namibia the summer after my third semester at Harvard—just barely in time for it to completely transform my college experience. Before Namibia, I had felt that I was fishing through a vast institution and corpus of knowledge for ideas to master and call my own, feeling more confusion than clarity about my quest and unable to pull my thoughts together, such that I couldn’t talk to faculty about my interests and I certainly didn’t feel ready to write my thesis, let alone think seriously about graduate work. I had the feeling that I wasn’t really taking advantage of my time at Harvard—and I was right. But try as I might, I was making only small progress, and didn’t know what else to do.
Namibia was absolutely necessary food for my brain, integrating and redefining my identities as a person and a student. From the moment I arrived, my conception of developing countries and development was turned on its head, and I saw possibilities that were never before open to me. Living and doing meaningful work along side local people in Namibia for three months was enough to turn this world that was so thoroughly and completely different, and yet so deeply resonant and therapeutic for me, into a place that I still today call home. In all the contours and the everyday details of this new world I came to know, I didn’t see stereotypes of hungry children and a poverty-stricken continent. Rather, what I saw constantly surprised and thoroughly bewildered my sensibilities until they were silly and giddy. I saw a kind of vision and creativity alive and thriving that I didn’t know existed, a way of life that was as viable as it was vibrant. I saw clearly the fundamental holes and gaps in contemporary development discourse and practice, and the obvious potential and need for a different approach. And, I saw how myself and others like me could and should play a key role in this new approach. No experience I could have had at Harvard in four years could have compared to the impact on my worldview that each minute standing on the ground in Namibia—breathing in the air and touching the dirt to convince myself it was all not a dream—had for me.
Back at Harvard this past year, the resources available to me have been outstanding, because I feel grounded now in a practical confidence of knowing what I am looking for. Namibia and development did not replace my prior interests, but it gave them shape and the vehicle in which to be expressed. By zeroing in academically on the philosophical frameworks underlying development (processes in which one cultural community tries to interact with and help another, or a given community tries to understand itself and better its condition), my interdisciplinary academic plan—which draws on such fields as anthropology, philosophy of race and racism, and empirical social analysis—necessarily involves practical fieldwork in Namibia no less than it does abstract reflections on identity and human relationships. Moreover, by integrating the high and the low, the personal and the political, the intuitive and the rigorous, the mundane and the transcendent, the cultural other and the cultural self—this new academic focus expresses who I am with a simplicity and clarity that I could not have had before.
It is entirely because of my first-hand experience in Namibia with WorldTeach—made possible by the fellowship I received from the Center for International Development—that I finally feel that I know something specific that is worth sharing; and that confidence and experience has defined my year here. For the first time I have been seeking out faculty members in various fields to connect my interests to theirs and to obtain reading suggestions and advice. I created a website for Namibian development, arranged to have a Namibian language tutorial added to the African studies program here, joined up with other students who are starting innovative NGOs and businesses for and on the continent, enrolled in a course at the Graduate School of Education to follow-up on my WorldTeach experience, and most importantly secured a travel grant and began to carefully plan for a 6-month return trip to Namibia during the fall semester of 2005, when I will build off of my past contacts and experience to pursue an independent research program and pilot some of the ideas that I’ve been developing with colleagues at Harvard for a new approach to development. As a result of these experiences this year, I’ve already been able to write a preliminary sketch of the contours of my thesis, still a few semesters away, and concrete plans for post-graduate work are starting more and more to crystallize. It is because of the skills, hands-on experience and perspective I gained Namibia that I really learned how to make Harvard work for me, and how to give back to this community.
Namibia may not be the answer for every Harvard student. But, to every Harvard student, I would say: there is an answer. Don’t stay on at Harvard if you suspect you’re not taking full advantage of your time here. Take a summer or a semester off, go somewhere else. People often don’t know what they would do and where they would go with time off, and they see that as reason enough not to take it. But there is no real transformation that you can effect in yourself by brute force, without a change of venue. For those unsure, volunteering with WorldTeach is the ideal way for everyone (no matter your background) to get yourself on the ground and immediately involved with a local community vastly different from your own and very much in need, and to do work that is well-researched, cutting-edge, and part of a larger movement and that is guaranteed to transform your worldview and impact your life when you return.
Harvard students tend to feel anxious about their future. If that’s the case, there’s nothing better than slowing down the pace and living up (or changing up) your time here. Before I went to Namibia, although I always knew I wanted to go to grad school, it always loomed vaguely and ominously in the future. Now, without even noticing the transition, I feel as if I already am currently doing graduate-level work, such that applying to grad school and post-grad fellowships will just be a formality. Nor is a life in academia the limited path it once appeared to me, but I see now how it is not at all (necessarily) disjoint from a career in the arts, the non-profit and public sectors, and even the private sector. To a student who really knows what he or she wants to study, doors at Harvard (logistical, financial and intellectual) are wide open. Paradoxically, though, the problem is precisely that we all take ourselves to be that person who knows just where he/she is headed when we set foot on this campus. Thankfully—due especially to the generosity of some of the centers for international study, and the campus outreach efforts of WorldTeach—Harvard is also a place where if you change your mind and realize how little you knew before, the doors usually open even wider. I regret that many students, however, don’t find themselves on this campus until too late in their college career. I constantly speak to friends who wish they had taken time off and gone abroad earlier, while they still had time before their thesis and course load crunch. Harvard could be doing much more to shake students (and parents) out of their traditional four-year mindset early on, before they get to sophomore and junior year anxieties, and send them out into the world—where they can actually learn something of value and bring an exciting research program back to this community, rather than torturing themselves attempting to recycle what we all already know. What’s the hurry? A Harvard undergraduate education, where resources abound, only comes around once.
