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The following feature story appeared in the campus publication MOSAIC in April, 1996.
The Watson Fellows
Trinity's three Watson winners prepare for global voyages of exploration
Three Trinity seniors have won prestigious Watson Fellowships, which support a year of independent study and travel throughout the world. Thomas Appleton, Ian Waggett, and Gideon Pollach are among the 60 fellows selected this year by the Thomas J. Watson Foundation from a pool of 200 candidates nominated by 50 national liberal arts colleges. Each Watson Fellow will receive $16,000 to fund a year-long travel project.
"This is the third time in 28 years that Trinity has produced three winners in a single year. It's very gratifying," said J. Ronald Spencer '64, associate academic dean. "This year all four of the students we nominated struck us as having an especially strong and distinctive quality. All of them were deeply rooted in both personal and academic experiences at Trinity and the proposals all had deep personal resonance."
Thomas Appleton
Thomas Appleton's project is "Exploring the Generation Gap in Chinese Society." In China, the older a person is, the more respect is accorded to him or her, said Appleton, an economics and Asian studies major from Boston, who plans to travel next year through Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Shenzhen. He will survey and compare attitudes of older Chinese, who have maintained political authority, and the younger generation, which is moving rapidly into the spheres of business and technology.
Appleton expects that the younger generation, more reform-minded and capitalistic, "will begin to assert their power actively, and will no longer tolerate being pushed aside or ignored because of their age. As a result, the societal structure of China will change dramatically." Through conversation with Chinese of all ages (he is proficient in Mandarin) - executives of companies, officials and politicians, and the common people - Appleton will investigate the impact of modernization, Western ideas, and economics on the people, the society, and the politics in today's constantly changing China.
Gideon Pollach
Gideon Pollach, a music major from Washington, D.C., will spend his year observing and studying nine to 12 of England's larger cathedral, school and college choirs "to compare local traditions to the common English practices." Pollach, who joined an Anglican choir at the age of six, says that he "soon came to love the tradition and style of the music of the church." He is particularly interested in the choral tradition that emerged in the 16th century, and he explains that "the music of the English sacred composers has a style which has remained distinct from that of other religious musical heritages."
Pollach is a co-founder of Trinity's a capella group the Accidentals, president of the Trinity Chapel Singers, and a member of Trinity's Concert Choir and three neighboring church choirs in Connecticut.
"I'll interview English choir masters, members of the congregations, and choristers and will investigate how each choir differs from the others in its customs and repertorial focus," he said. He will focus on the "interaction of customs and common practices" by observing rehearsals, following choirs on tour, and, he hopes, singing with the choirs.
Ian Waggett
Ian Waggett, who is this year's President's Fellow in international studies, will spend his year traveling about and working on the contemporary frontiers of Australia, Russia, and Greenland. A resident of West Hartford, Conn., he spent his junior year in Siberia and is fluent in Russian. A few years ago, Waggett worked over the summer on a ranch in Texas, and his experiences there became the genesis of his Watson proposal.
Waggett will "live among and observe how these frontier societies and communities work, in what ways they may be eccentric, and why they are precious to humanity," he said. The three societies are little understood and he is fascinated by the fact that "under the extreme pressures of isolation and climate that have preserved them in obscurity, these frontiers are places where friendship, families, and education are all of a very special nature. I plan to live with and among families while working on farms as I search for the poetic, the sublime, and the tragic elements of these isolated societies and their devilish climates."
Waggett will stay in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia, move on to the forested tundra of Yakutia in Northern Siberia, and then travel to the fjord systems in Scoresby Sound on the east coast of Greenland. In these locales he hopes to become a member of the community, using his past experiences which he hopes will provide valuable insights and enable him to get a more unique point of view of these cultures and to compare the indigenous and the colonial populations within them.
- Monique Lee '97