The CUNY Baccalaureate Blog

January 2007

The Gilman International Scholarship Program offers grants for U.S. citizen undergraduate students of limited financial means to pursue academic studies abroad. Such international study is intended to better prepare U.S. students to assume significant roles in an increasingly global economy and interdependent world.

In 2007, two CUNY Baccalaureate Program students - Dulce Wechsler and Lei Yu — earned this prestigious honor; their profiles follow.

Dulce Wechsler was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. Upon her high school graduation, her father refused to pay for college because she wanted to study journalism; he felt that was no career for a woman. Wechsler applied to an English program in Los Angeles (earning a full scholarship) with the idea of returning to Venezuela as an English teacher; then she would use the money she earned to pay for her own further education. But instead of returning to Venezuela, she relocated to Miami to work in the music industry promoting Latin American music which she did from 1997 on. (She received 15 credits from the CUNY BA Program for her work in Media Planning, Copywriting, Public Relations, Advertising and Marketing). She earned a few credits at Miami-Dade Community College and entered Hunter College in 2005. In 2006, she entered the CUNY Baccalaureate Program.

Wechsler designed her concentration in Latin American Literature with Prof. Maria Hernandez-Ojeda, Romance Languages, Hunter College. Her specific study is of the Latin American canon from pre-Columbian to Contemporary Literatures, within the themes of multicultural interaction such as Coloniality, Post-Coloniality and Border Thinking. This is an area she hopes to pursue in graduate school.

Wechsler received a highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Institute of International Education. With this, she will study in Argentina during the January 2007 winter break. Her other honors include receiving a Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowship, induction into HAT (Hunter Achievement Team), election as president of the Hunter Spanish literary magazine, a CUNY President’s award for academic achievement in Romance languages, and a place on the Dean’s List. Wechsler is expected to graduate summa cum laude with her B.A. in January 2008.

Lei Yu was born in a small village in China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Limited by the economic, political, social and intellectual disruptions of the revolution, she left China for the U.S. in 1997, belatedly pursuing her intellectual interests (and recently receiving American citizenship). She had to learn English here and attributes her success to the many teachers and support staff at Hunter who pushed her to excel. Lisa Tolhurst, Hunter College Lecturer in English, wrote that Yu is “one of the most outstanding students I have taught my fifteen-year teaching career at Hunter, NYU and the University of Melbourne, Australia.”

Yu is particularly interested in religion, especially Eastern religions, a subject of course vigorously discouraged in her native communist China. Believing that “politics and spiritual searching are inextricably linked,” she designed a concentration in “Religion and Politics” under the mentorship of Prof. Barbara Sproul, Religion, Hunter with courses from City, Hunter and Baruch Colleges.

Thanks to the Gilman International Scholarship, Yu will study at Humboldt University in Germany, desiring to absorb German history and culture as well as a study of some of the great philosophers, including Kant, Hegel and Heiddeger. Yu’s other honors include the Harriet Brows Scholarship, the Women’s Forum Educational Award, and the Charlotte W. Newcomb Scholarship. Yu’s goal is to work for the Foreign Service or a human rights organization. She is expected to graduate with her B.A. in June 2008.

For further information contact Beth Kneller, Deputy Director, 212-817-8238, bkneller@gc.cuny.edu