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Date: November 14, 1996
Princeton's Dale Fellowships Help Students
Follow Their Dreams
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Last summer, Trinh Huynh, a Vietnamese-American who 17 years ago fled her native land aboard a small boat, retraced her roots to her mother's village near Saigon.
Huynh was among seven Princeton juniors who benefited this year from fellowships provided by Martin A. Dale of Princeton's Class of 1953 that allowed them to pursue projects of their own devising. The Dale summer fellowships, in existence since 1991, are intended to provide opportunities for personal growth; foster independence, creativity and leadership skills; and broaden or deepen some area of special interest.
Now, a new gift from Mr. Dale will enable an outstanding Princeton senior to devote the entire year following graduation to an independent project meant to widen the recipient's experience of the world and significantly enhance his or her personal growth and intellectual development. This annual postgraduate fellowship embodies Dale's conviction of the transformative potential of a year-long project of focused effort and self-discovery before a new graduate embarks on the next major phase of life and career.
"Very often circumstances force young people to make decisions about their lives and work without the opportunity to reflect adequately upon their interests or to explore latent talents," said Dale. "I hope that this new fellowship will enable some number of graduating seniors to take the time to do right by themselves -- and will in turn help inspire them to do their best on others' behalf."
The Dale postgraduate fellowship will provide a grant of $20,000. The recipient will be selected on the basis of his or her proposal, particularly its clarity of focus and its feasibility, as well as the candidate's integrity and intellectual or creative talent. The fellowship project may involve travel, either in the United States or abroad. It will not normally involve extended study or participation in a formal program. Rather, the emphasis will be on a special, independent initiative of the recipient's own devising.
One can begin to appreciate the impact the yearlong fellowship might have through the testimony of the summer fellows. Each summer fellow receives a grant of $3,000 for his or her project, plus, for any student who receives financial aid, the replacement of his or her expected summer earnings.
Trinh Huynh is now a history major at Princeton. After she and her family arrived in the United States in 1979, they settled in Gainesville, Georgia, where they were welcomed into the local community. Born into Buddhism, Huynh grew up attending a Baptist church. She can converse in Vietnamese, but mostly speaks English with a drawl. In returning to Vietnam, she said, she wanted to see "where the Vietnamese part of me fits into my life." She also wanted to try to help a people she knew had suffered ravages in the years since her departure. She spent much of her summer volunteering in a hospital in Saigon and teaching English. "I wanted to bring with me a sense of the American spirit -- the ideals of freedom and individuality," as well as the personal generosity she had known in Georgia, she said.
Huynh also visited the countryside and stayed for a while in the rural fishing village near Saigon that had been her mother's birthplace. She met her mother's friends and neighbors, as well as relatives of whom she had no memory, and she visited the grave of the grandmother who had hoped to follow her family to the United States. She was shocked to witness the living conditions people endured. "You see before you this Princeton student," she said, "but her relatives are living in huts, with floors of dried mud."
David Garza, a native of Texas who had wondered about the enormous political and economic changes occurring just across the border, spent three months in Mexico City, making his own observations and beginning a collection of poetry. Garza, a major in comparative literature, was impressed with the spirit evident in the people he met in the streets of the city. "It is polluted and ridden with crime," he said. "Yet, it's an inspiring place at the same time -- there's a palpable energy."
Garza became intrigued by the cultural and political history of the city and particularly by the way they merged in the Communist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. He was struck that contemporary Mexicans still bear a strong sense of their cultural heritage. "They all can tell you about Diego Rivera," he said. Rivera's murals of laborers formed a proud artistic legacy that remains "an integral part of Mexican life." Garza believes that artists of Rivera's generation "played a different role -- they had a political impact."
Garza is still at work on his collection of poetry . "I was moved by everything around me," he said. "It's hard to say when I'll be finished. In fact, if I have my way, I'll end up living there."
Another artist who remains at work on the material from her summer trip is Mandy Miller, a major in art and archaeology, who traveled to southern France to interpret for herself the landscapes that had inspired the painters she most admired. "I had read Van Gogh's journal and studied the post-Impressionists," she said, "and I didn't know what they meant about the color. But it was amazing: The countryside is bathed in a bright blue light. It is very acute. The stucco buildings are almost blinding at midday."
At Arles, Miller made another discovery that informed her understanding of the art from the period: "I thought Cezanne had taken the landscape and simply abstracted it -- almost for the fun of it," she said. "But as I gazed at the landscape, the needles of the pine trees formed these clusters of color -- they were just what Cezanne had painted."
Economics major Craig Finlayson also takes inspiration from landscapes, though his pursuits are less artistic than athletic. He harbored the dream of completing the "Colorado Grand Slam" -- climbing the 53 mountains in the state taller than 14,000 feet -- since the day when, at age six, his parents "dragged me up Pike's Peak." Before this summer he managed to scale 14, and he set himself the challenge of topping the remaining 39 in two and a half months. He achieved 38.
Finlayson made two attempts on the last holdout -- Crestone Peak -- but was hindered both times by bad weather. During his second attempt, he had climbed to within 50 feet of the summit when a freak snowstorm made conditions too dicey to continue. But Finlayson -- who believes the chief benefit of his summer quest was having the opportunity "to spend a lot of time with myself, which wasn't always that much fun" -- took defeat philosophically. "Maybe in a way it was a good thing for me," he said. "It preserved the mystique of the Grand Slam, it gave me one more thing to do, and it helped rejuvenate my passion."
Dale, himself a major in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, spent the year following graduation as a Fulbright fellow at the University of Strasbourg in France. He earned a master's degree in international economics from Tufts University in 1955. After five years as a foreign service officer in the U.S. Department of State, he became privy counselor and economic adviser to Prince Ranier III of Monaco and, in 1965, vice president of the Grand Bahama Port Authority. Two years later, he assumed the role of senior vice president for finance, administration and operations of Revlon International Corp. In 1972, he became corporate senior vice president and director of strategic projects for W.R. Grace & Co., a position he held for 10 years. He retired as a consultant in corporate strategic planning.
Said Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel: "We are deeply grateful to Mr. Dale for the imagination and vision he has shown in finding a way to help a lucky graduating senior have a year's experience that can help shape a life in extraordinary ways, to come to understand himself or herself and to develop the qualities of character and perseverance necessary to lasting achievement. Like the Dale summer fellowships, the new Dale postgraduate award will quickly take its place as one of the most sought-after opportunities available to Princeton undergraduates."