Eleven students and grads win scholarships
Leila Barackman ’22 credits her Wheaton education with building up her confidence to face challenges head-on.
“Wheaton allowed me to think about my options outside of what I thought was possible for myself,” she said. “I knew I wanted to be a teacher, but Wheaton pushed me to think outside the box and encouraged me to shoot for the stars and incorporate different experiences into the realm of teaching.”
Barackman will spend the year teaching English to schoolchildren in Madrid as a Fulbright scholar.
Altogether, 11 Wheaton College students and recent graduates earned prestigious international scholarships that support scholarship and experiential learning. They are the latest in a long line of Wheaton scholars to win such awards. In 2024, the U.S. State Department identified the college as one of the top Fulbright-producing institutions in the country.
The success of Wheaton students in capturing scholarships for advanced study does not happen by chance, said Associate Professor of English Winter Jade Werner, who serves as the college’s coordinator of the Scholar Development Advisory Committee. Other members of the committee are Senior Professor of the Practice of German Laura Bohn Case, Senior Professor of the Practice of English Angie Sarhan, Associate Director of the Center for Global Education Alida Gomez and Senior Student Success Advisor Susan Friedman.
“We are creating a culture in which scholarships and fellowships are seen as something to which any student can aspire,” she said. “The prerequisite is that you have to have passion for it and be willing to work at it.”
The results testify that the culture is taking root. In addition to Barackman, two other recent grads won Fulbrights: Steven Legg ’22, who will spend 10 months teaching English, assimilating himself further to German culture and mastering his verbal language skills; and Emile Bautista-Bekken ’23 who is learning the Kazakh language, his seventh, while teaching in Kazakhstan. Will Coleman ’22 will travel to Japan to work as an assistant language teacher through the competitive Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program.
In some cases, students receive scholarships that further their education as undergraduates. For example, Bessie Reina Figueroa ’26 applied for and won a Projects for Peace grant to promote mental health literacy and destigmatize the topic in El Salvador. Syd Alves ’25, Clara Gonsalves ’25, Maggie Hart ’26, and Davina Sinkiewicz ’25 won Gilman scholarships, awarded by the U.S. State Department to fund study abroad for students with financial constraints.
“Above all else, Wheaton has a resource for everything,” Alves said. “Being a first generation college student, I had no idea how any of this worked. I never thought I was going to go abroad, so really having people who know what they’re doing, who have done this before, encouraging me and holding my hand every step of the way has been really wonderful.”
Carlos Yu ’24 tells a similar story about the support that helped him win a Watson Fellowship to travel to Nigeria, Singapore and Hong Kong to understand storytelling as a mode of resistance and community building.
“I have to give immense credit to my professors,” he said. “When I’m in their classes, I feel like they really know me. A lot of them have pushed me, sought me out for certain opportunities and advocated for me immensely.”
Professor Werner notes that the process of applying for a Fulbright, Watson or other competitive scholarship—from writing proposals and essays to preparing for interviews—pays dividends in helping students clarify their future goals and tell their stories in compelling ways.
Daphne Giampietro ’25 agrees. Although her application for a Beinecke Scholarship did not win her the award, the biology major said that she earned something more valuable. “It helped me see my desires and dreams more clearly,” she said.
“I started writing my application back in October and by the time I’d reached draft 13.0, I became decisive in what I wanted to do. I looked back over my life and found the connections that pulled me towards a future where I could see myself prospering. I was able to push through rough times and rough drafts to produce something I was proud of.”
It’s a message that Jillian Riveros ’22 shares with the students that she mentors in applying for the Goldwater Scholarship, a prize she won in 2021.
“Applying for scholarships isn’t easy and you don’t always get them,” Riveros said. “I want to remind people to be persistent and keep pushing through and keep applying even if you don’t get it the first or second time. If it’s really your dream to do something, then don’t stop.”
This spring, Riveros won a prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) Oxford-Cambridge scholarship that will allow her to pursue her doctoral degree in biomedical research at the University of Cambridge.