Five seniors have received University prizes allowing them to pursue independent projects after graduation, taking on ideas that range from giving hospice patients a voice to supporting Peruvian children with disabilities.
MARTIN A. DALE ’53 FELLOWSHIP
DAVID LIND is a philosophy major who will write a music album inspired by the volunteer work he has done with hospice patients. He plans to spend the summer writing the songs at home in northern Arizona, record them in Nashville in the fall, and tour in the spring.
His interest in hospice began when his grandmother died as he completed high school; during his sophomore year at Princeton he joined a Pace Center program that sends students to visit patients at a local hospice facility once a week.
Lind said he was especially affected by a patient who loved gardening, and wrote a song called “Garden” about her experience in hospice care. Shortly before he recorded the vocals, Lind learned that she had died.
He was invited to her funeral, where he met her family. “She had constructed this picture of her life, and suddenly I was stepping into the picture,” Lind said. He realized that he could write an album based on patients’ stories and his own reflections. “Maybe some of [the songs] are about death and dying, but many of them might be just telling the story of a patient’s life,” he said. “Many people in hospice are more in the present than any of us are.”
LISTEN to Lind’s new song, “Garden”
XIAODI ALICE TANG studies computer science and is receiving a certificate in quantitative and computational biology. She plans to develop and lead workshops that “explore creating at the intersection of arts and STEM” in schools and community centers in the United States and in China, where she was born.
“I will document and reflect on the process through photographs, drawings, and journalism — especially pertaining to different cultural values and expectations regarding STEM, arts, and education,” Tang said.
HENRY RICHARDSON LABOUISSE ’26 PRIZE for international civic-engagement projects
Politics major LAVINIA LIANG will work for the New Citizen Program, a Chinese nonprofit that helps educate the children of rural migrants in Beijing. “China is currently undergoing a massive human-migration crisis, and children are often caught in the middle of — and left behind in — this national modernization,” she said.
As a communications officer for the New Citizen Program, Liang will work on development and research and will lead creative-writing and visual-arts workshops for migrant workers’ children. “I want to encourage them to tell their own stories,” she said.
KATIE TYLER, a Near Eastern studies major, will work for a nonprofit in Morocco that seeks to alleviate poverty. Her work will focus on two areas: preparing underprivileged youth for employment, and teaching people in rural communities about water sustainability and conservation.
“I wrote my junior paper about an earthquake in 1960 that leveled the city of Agadir, where I will be living next year,” she said.
ERIKA WARD is a Woodrow Wilson School major who will live in Cusco, Peru, where she will work with local nonprofits that help orphanages to house children with disabilities, inform disabled Peruvians of their legal rights, and develop summer day camps for orphaned children with disabilities. “Mainstream schools do not accommodate children with disabilities, so access to education falls largely to families and caretakers in orphanages,” she said.
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