Ema Woodward remembers as a young girl gazing out from the balcony of her home that overlooked the Western Pacific Ocean. She saw floating trash and wasn’t too young to know that something should be done.
Years later, as a teenager, she traveled to Bali with her mother, who was attending a conference. From the resort, they didn’t have a chance to mingle with the residents. But during a drive off the resort grounds, Woodward saw a child in tattered clothes, standing on the concrete divider of a highway, holding an infant. She was crying. It made Woodward cry, too.
In college at Carnegie Mellon, the Global Studies major spent her junior year studying in France. There, too, she witnessed “eye-openers” but on a diplomatic level. Owing to negative “stereotypes and media-based images,” she says there was a disconnect between her French-American interaction expectations versus the actual exchanges she encountered.
Her lifetime of international experiences drew her to the Pickering Fellowship. In addition to receiving scholarship support, those selected participate in two paid internships, one domestic and one overseas. Afterward, the fellows have a minimum three-year commitment as U.S. foreign service officers, a corps of working professionals who support U.S. foreign policy around the world.
Woodward, who will graduate this spring, applied and was one of only 40 students selected from more than 1,000 applicants. She knows that the fellowship is quite a commitment, including living abroad; but she believes that what she’s lived through, from Micronesia to Bali to France, has groomed her for this very role.
—Michelle Bova (DC’07)
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Student: Ema Woodward
Carnegie Mellon Senior Awarded Prestigious Pickering Fellowship
