Two Davenport College seniors -- Daniel Adamson and Joshua West -- will be bound for Great Britain following graduation as winners of prestigious Marshall Scholarships.
The Marshall Scholarships were established in 1953 by the British Parliament as a gesture of thanks to the American people for assistance received from the Marshall Plan during World War II. The awards allow students to study in the United Kingdom for up to three years and cover the cost of tuition, as well as books, travel and living expenses.
A third Yale student, Jacob Sullivan, was also selected to receive a Marshall Scholarship, but declined the award to accept a Rhodes Scholarship instead. (See related story, left.)
Adamson, who is majoring at Yale in ethics, politics and economics, will spend three years at Oxford University studying contemporary moral and political philosophy. He then plans to return to the United States to pursue a law degree. His eventual goal is to become a law professor specializing in legal philosophy.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Adamson hails from Atlanta, Georgia, and has worked for the Carter Center for International Peace there. He spent last summer as a volunteer for two human rights organizations in Hong Kong. He has also been a volunteer in the undergraduate-run TIES (Tutoring in the Elementary Schools) and Youth Together programs. He has been a cellist with the Yale Symphony Orchestra for four years, and will appear as a featured soloist in the YSO's Feb. 7 concert. His other extracurricular activities have included serving as editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of Ethics and playing intramural basketball and baseball.
West is majoring at Yale both in international studies and in geology and geophysics. He also plans to pursue a double major at Cambridge University, where he will be studying for master's degrees in two one-year programs: in quaternary sciences (geology), and in environment and development. He hopes someday to work on contemporary environmental change, either from a scientific perspective or from a policy perspective.
West has already had the opportunity to work in his chosen career field. Last summer, he explored the effect of acid rain on the Catskills Mountains, while working on an ecosystems study in upstate New York. The previous summer, he did research on hydrothermal circulation in mid-ocean ridges at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A native of Santa Fe, Mexico, West has been a member of the men's heavyweight crew since freshman year, is a member of St. Anthony Hall and served for a year as vice president of the Davenport College Council.