Jessica Goldberg, Ph.D. student in Public Policy and Economics, used a Rackham International Research Award to conduct field experiments in Malawi
Anthropology students are headed for Bulgaria, Japan and Sierra Leone. Ph.D. candidates in history will be working in the Marshall Islands, Russia and Azerbaijan. A nascent scholar pursuing a joint degree in social work and political science is bound for Haiti.
Other than being Rackham students, they have one other thing in common: none of them would be able to make these journeys without a Rackham International Research Award.
“Rackham has as its goal supporting the work of truly outstanding students who otherwise wouldn’t have the resources to complete their research,” says John Godfrey, assistant dean, international education. “This is really one of the most important investments the graduate school makes that directly affects the research and scholarship of students.”
The geography of graduate work has changed dramatically in the last 20 years or so. Where international research was once largely the province of specialists in the study of some distant part of the world, globalization is the new normal for doctoral education.
“The careers of students in any graduate program are, more than ever, going to develop within an international context,” says Godfrey. “Many of their collaborators and colleagues throughout their careers will be in research institutions outside the U.S. The significance of these awards is that they enable students early in their careers to develop the kind of network connections that will provide a platform for their development as scientists and scholars. Getting out there and seeing how scholarship is done outside the United States has to be a part of their professional development.”
They’re “getting out there,” indeed. Rackham International Research Awards are supporting students on every continent but Antarctica, in fields as diverse as dance, urban planning, chemistry, public health, art history, psychology, environmental studies, comparative literature, economics and civil and environmental engineering.
The awards range from $5,000 to $7,500, and their number has more than doubled, from 19 to 40, since the program’s inception in 2006. The number of applications, not surprisingly, has grown proportionately.
“The overall quality of these applications is extraordinarily high,” Godfrey says. “These are students with great skills in their discipline and often in the languages of the country they will be doing the research in. Many of the projects are highly innovative, interdisciplinary, and at the leading edge of their home field.”
And many of them wouldn’t get done, or would be done less than optimally, were it not for these awards.
“Until this, if students didn’t have funding for an extensive period overseas, they would shorten it or eliminate it entirely,” he says, “or they would draw out their research period while they waited to accumulate the funds to do what they needed to do, and this would drag out the degree. This allows us to put money into the hands of students when they need it to go do very focused research.”
“When they need it” is the key phrase. Money is always important, but money at the right time is crucial, and the International Research Awards are but one of what Godfrey calls “strategic increments of funding” that Rackham can provide at various stages of a student’s career to defray research-related expenses or supplement external grants.
“The graduate school for decades has produced generations of students who have become leaders in the study of many different parts of the world,” Godfrey notes. “We are continuing this tradition of supporting and encouraging students to take their research globally. Most of Rackham’s budget, nearly $50 million a year, goes to student support.”
One measure of the strategy’s success is this stunning statistic: in 2010, for the fourth year in a row and the fifth year in the last six, Rackham students received more Fulbright Scholarships than did students at any other U.S. university.
Godfrey isn’t too modest to point out a reasonable inference: “With the kind of funding they get from Rackham,” he says, “our students are so well prepared for that international competition that they rise to the top.”
Published in: Alumni Updates