Seniors and Recent Alumni To Study at Cambridge as Winners of Gates Scholarships

Two current Yale College seniors and two Class of 2007 graduates were among the 37 American recipients of Gates Scholarships to pursue graduate study at the University of Cambridge next fall.

Rachel Boyd ‘09, William Schmidt ‘09, Vadim Tsipenyuk ‘07 and Usha Chilukuri ‘07 were chosen from a pool of 752 U.S. applicants.

The Gates Scholarship allows students from outside the United Kingdom to pursue graduate study at the University of Cambridge. The award is given “on the basis of a person’s intellectual ability, leadership capacity and desire to use their knowledge to contribute to society throughout the world by providing service to their communities and applying their talents and knowledge to improve the lives of others.” The Gates Cambridge Trust, which administers the scholarship program, was established in 2000 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The trust elects approximately 100 new scholars from all over the world each year.

The following are brief profiles of the winning Yale students:

Rachel Boyd

Boyd, who grew up in Brunswick, Maine, has been in love with Italy and all things Italian since she spent two years in Rome as a child. “That’s where I really first became interested in art,” she says.

Pursuing a double major in the history of art and Italian, she returned to Italy to spend a semester at the University of Bologna.

She became fascinated by the peculiar experience of tourists and artists from all over Europe, Great Britain in particular, who visited Rome in the 18th and 19th centuries. “They saw the ruins as I saw them - with foreign eyes,” she says.

Her area of research focuses on the neo-classical movement that grew out of this encounter with the world of ancient Rome.

In her last year at Yale, she is taking a painting course, because, she says, “as a curator, as a student of art history, it’s really helpful to have a sense of what goes into producing art.

“Painting is a lot harder than I thought it would be,” she confesses, though she adds that she’s really enjoying it.

Boyd served on the staff of the Yale Daily News as both a reporter on the arts beat and as a news editor, and she is a Yale Journalism Scholar.

At the Yale University Art Gallery she is currently serving an internship studying the 18th-century Italian neo-classical engraver Giovanni Piranesi. While working on her M.Phil. in Cambridge, she will do research on the British artists and architects who found inspiration in Rome. Before arriving in Cambridge, she says, she hopes to get a chance to visit Italy.

Boyd intends eventually to get a doctorate in art history, with the career goal of becoming a museum curator.

William Schmidt

A double major in psychology and English literature, Schmidt has found a calling in criminology.

He came to Yale from Richmond, Virginia, having already done neuroscience research in high school. “I always had an interest in the brain,” he says. He also has a “passion” for English literature, he notes.

One of the experiences that whetted Schmidt’s interest in criminology was a job he had this summer working on a “jail diversion program” in New Haven. The program addresses the criminalization of the mentally ill that followed the closing of state hospitals. Rather than send mentally disturbed criminals back to prison, where their condition will worsen, a volunteer/intern works on integrating the individual into a social network.

Schmidt cites the case of a woman with a history of drug abuse. Applying the “life skills” lessons she had learned through the program, she avoided relapsing on a particularly stressful day by organizing a trip to the beach with other students to build sand castles.

He is doing his senior project in psychology on the diversion program. For his English senior project, he is looking at how violence is treated in epic poetry. The working title of his thesis is “Representation of Gore in Homer, Milton and Beyond.”

A captain of the Ballroom Dance Team and vice president of the Mock Trial Association at Yale, Schmidt will pursue an M.Phil. in criminology at Cambridge. Afterwards he would like to work on developing policy in criminology, perhaps working with the non-profit Innocence Project, which is dedicated to proving the innocence of wrongfully jailed prisoners through DNA. He puts “starting law school” as the last goal in his five-year plan.

Vadim Tsipenyuk

Tsipenyuk, a native of Moscow, grew up in New Haven, and for now calls New York City “home.” He was a biomedical engineering and economics major at Yale, and graduated with a B.S. degree. At Yale, he was on the varsity fencing team and wrote for the Yale Scientific Magazine.

In high school, Tsipenyuk volunteered at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and as an undergraduate, he did research in biochemistry, MRI imaging and drug delivery systems. Despite the clinical relevance of this research experience, he says, he doesn’t intend to pursue a career in medicine.

Rather, his combined interests in engineering and business drew him to his current Wall Street job analyzing the investment potential of technology companies, and determined his intended career. At Cambridge, he will earn an M.Phil. in bioscience enterprise. He notes that Cambridge is one of the few universities that offers a degree that so exactly fits his needs. After Cambridge he hopes to work at a technology investing firm, eventually to enter government helping to develop technology policy.

Usha Chilukuri

Chilukuri, who grew up in San Diego, is also enjoying life in New York, working at a “boutique” litigation firm and taking advantage of the cultural offerings of the city.

At Yale, her extracurricular activities included tutoring public school students, volunteering for the homeless, and editing Our Education, a magazine that advocates for public school students in New Haven. She also joined Ballet Folklórico Méxicano, which she said was “a way to study dance” again, having taken ballet for years as a child.

Following graduation, Chilukuri spent a year in Guangzhou as a Yale China teaching fellow at Sun Yat-Sen University.

As a history major at Yale, Chilukuri became interested in the turbulent period in 17th-century Britain that profoundly affected the development of the English legal system. She will pursue her M.Phil. in early modern history at Cambridge, focusing her research on the origins of copyright law. She intends to pursue a law degree after Cambridge and is particularly interested in the question of intellectual property.