Levine/Weinberg Fellowship
The Max A. Shacknai COVE selects students annually for the Levine/Weinberg Endowed Summer Fellowship. This fellowship provides highly qualified students, interested in pursuing a career in community and/or public work, with summer internship funding in the field of direct community service. This year’s recipients are:
Rachel Brown ’16 interned at Vida Volunteer in Costa Rica, working at a rural health clinic in Costa Rica.
Brown is planning on pursuing physician assistant studies after graduation. This summer, she was a part of the medical team working with resident physicians and other student volunteers at mobile medical clinics in underprivileged areas of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. During two weeks of clinics, the team was able to care for 355 patients, treating health issues such as parasites, Chikungunya virus, hypertension, urinary tract infections, varicose veins, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, severe allergies, and much more.
Brown wrote of the trip, “This experience further confirmed that the health care field is where I’m meant to be, and I learned so much. I learned about countless conditions and diseases and how to treat them, how to communicate with people across a cultural and language barrier, how to work with a huge variety of people, and about myself. I also further developed my fluency and medical vocabulary in Spanish, a skill that will undoubtedly be beneficial for my future in health care.”
Eli Brick ’17 interned with Bright Start, an education nonprofit that provides access to quality education to children in disadvantaged communities in Hout Bay, South Africa. He has taken Ryan Solomon’s core South Africa course and was interested in continuing his engagement with community work in the country particularly as it relates to education and educational mobility for children. Brick was primarily responsible for the management of the organization’s community workshop program and various social media platforms. The workshops target parents from Hout Bay’s two areas and cover topics that are relevant to the challenges they face raising their children in these communities. Following his extended study in which he learned a great deal about post-apartheid South Africa and the circumstances driving many of the nation’s contemporary social movements, Brick was able to apply much of that knowledge in his experience with Bright Start.
Ranissa Adityavarman ’16 interned with Bumi Sehat in Bali, Indonesia. Adityavarman worked in Bumi Sehat’s Youth Center delivering free conversational English classes to local school children aged 10+ through an after-school program. These classes contained everything from basic grammar, to career discussions, to learning songs. Adityavarman was honored to work with incredible students and teachers who continue to devote themselves to improving their education by choice and on top of regular school hours. Adityavarman was also able to improve her Indonesian language skills to a working level that will benefit her professionally in a career in foreign service after Colgate.