A Carolina alumnus has been awarded a 2017 Princeton in Asia Fellowship. Brian Bartholomew, a 2016 graduate with distinction from Eldersburg, Maryland, will live and work in Beijing for a year.
As a 2017-18 Princeton in Asia Fellow, Bartholomew, a Phi Beta Kappa member and Honors Carolina Laureate, will work in Beijing as an Environmental Law and Governance Research Fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an NGO founded to safeguard the earth — its people, its plants and animals and the natural systems on which all life depends.
During his time at UNC, the economics and political science major served as co-director for the Duke-UNC China Leadership Summit, which brought together leading experts with more than a hundred students from around the U.S. and China for three days of panel discussions, workshops and networking. He also contributed to “The Hill” and “East Asia Nexus” magazine, campus publications in Durham and Chapel Hill.
In 2014, Bartholomew received the William D. Weir Honors Fellowship in Asian Studies and spent six months in Beijing completing an intensive language immersion program followed by a finance and marketing research internship with Zihua Creative, China’s first online learning platform focused on the creative industries. The following summer, he returned to Beijing to further his study in Mandarin Chinese at the Princeton in Beijing program which was funded through a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship provided by the Carolina Asia Center and the U.S. Department of Education. In 2016, Bartholomew was selected by the Fulbright program to serve as an English teaching assistant in Taiwan for one year.
Founded in 1898, Princeton in Asia (PiA) is the oldest and largest organization of its kind, unique in its scope, size, century-long expertise and emphasis on service. Through transformative, service-oriented experiences for bright, talented graduates, PiA seeks to promote good will and understanding and to facilitate in every way the free interchange of the best ideals in the civilizations of both East and West. The program arranges fellowships and internships with Asian host organizations that contribute to important global issues at the local level: education, public health, environmental sustainability, access to information/media, economic development and social justice. Fellowships are the means of fostering person-to-person diplomacy, enhancing mutual understanding, contributing to communities with unmet needs and providing transformative experiences for fellows and host communities. PiA has nearly eighty partner organizations in Asia and an active base of alumni and friends numbering over 4,000.
Learn more about the Princeton in Asia Fellowship here.
Follow ODS on Twitter: @ODS_UNCCH
Interested in setting up an appointment with the Office of Distinguished Scholarships? Send us an email: ods@unc.edu
