New York state of mind

15 July, 2013

New York state of mind

New York City will be home to two former University of Waikato students who have received Fulbright Awards to continue their studies in the United States.

Fran Gourdie from Hamilton and Samantha Hill, originally from New Plymouth, will both head to the Big Apple in August to complete masters degrees at the prestigious Columbia University.

Gourdie, who attended Hamilton Girls High School, has received a general graduate award and will complete a Master of Laws degree in Human Rights and International Trade Law while Hill received a Fulbright Science and Innovation Award and will complete a Master of Science degree in Sustainability Management.

They will be joined in the US by Waikato University history lecturer Nēpia Mahuika, who received a Fulbright New Zealand Scholar Award and will research the roles of oral traditions and oral histories as historical sources for Native American and Māori at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana.

Dr Mahuika leaves for the US in two weeks - with his wife and three children - and says he’s looking forward to seeing if his theories on oral history and tradition apply to other cultures.

“It will be good to test them on another indigenous people,” he says.

Aside from exposing his thesis ideas to another culture, Dr Mahuika is hoping to complete a book on oral history and traditions and will also speak at several conferences, including one on cultural appropriation in the week after he arrives.

“I’ll be busy.”

Gourdie – who graduated in 2010 with a BSC and LLB (Hons) - says Columbia’s good reputation was only part of the reason she wanted to study there.

“It’s a practical course, you have to have previous experience to go there,” she says.

“I’ve been practicing for three and a half years now so I didn’t want to go back to academia as such.”

She will be at Columbia for ten months and says her future options remain wide open. She is confident the Fulbright experience will open her up to all sorts of possibilities.

“I’m not sure what I want to do,” she says.

“I want to still be practicing but I don’t really know. I want to be open to opportunities in a bigger pool of people so I don’t have a firm plan. It’s pretty exciting, I’ve never been to the US,” she says.

Hill – who graduated earlier this year– is equally excited about studying at Columbia and says she will eventually return to New Zealand “with a new and more global perspective on sustainability issues”.

She will spend a year and a half at Columbia and says her programme is co-taught by Columbia’s School of Continuing Education and the Earth Institute, which develops practical solutions for sustainability through scientific research and education.

“I was first inspired by their work while reading for my first year environmental science class, and receiving this award is an incredible opportunity to go and learn firsthand from experts in the field of sustainability,” she says.

“My papers and work placements (at Waikato) really highlighted the importance of understanding the management and policy context of research, and this was the major influence in my decision to pursue an interdisciplinary masters degree.”

ENDS

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