With guards standing nearby, Paulina Reyes stares at the fence dividing the United States from Mexico. It’s 18-feet-high and separates the cultures of her mom and dad. Reyes, whose father immigrated to the United States from Mexico at age 15, says her interest in her father’s heritage has always been there, just “dormant.”
Not anymore. Through a CMU Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, the architecture major is visiting the border the summer before her final year of undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon. She is examining architectural implications of water contamination and shortage faced by marginalized urban communities in Mexico City.
When she returns to school, the fellowship research becomes part of her senior thesis project. By year’s end, she has the opportunity to continue her research through a 2014 Fulbright grant, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”
More than 50 CMU students and alumni have received a Fulbright grant in the past two decades, including Reyes and five others in 2014 alone:
- Alexa Beaver (E’10), pursuing a research grant in Argentina
- Nina Mast (DC’14), teaching in Turkey
- Rachel Kuhn (DC’14), teaching in Germany
- Gabriella Rueda (DC’13), teaching in Brazil
- Mackenzie Evan Smith (DC’11), teaching in Montenegro
The Fulbright recipients worked with CMU’s Fellowships and Scholarships Office during each step of the application process, reports Stephanie Wallach, Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, who is in charge of that office. Reyes worked closely with Joanna Dickert, CMU’s Fulbright advisor. The end result was Reyes being one of only three CMU architecture students to ever receive the grant.
She is in Mexico City now, where her focus remains on water—specifically on “small-scale residential water treatment systems in poor communities in Mexico City.” During her nine-month stay there, she says she also hopes Mexico will end up feeling like her home, too, as it once was for her father.
—Michelle Bova (DC’07)
