On 12th April 2016, the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans announced its 2016 beneficiaries. The Paul & Daisy Fellowship for New Americans, established in December 1997 with a corpus of $50 million, is the premier graduate school fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants. It honors students of exceptional academic caliber by supporting their graduate education up to $90,000 over a two-year period. Creativity, originality, initiative and sustained accomplishments are three essential factors considered to qualify for the honor. In 2010, Paul & Daisy Soros contributed an additional $25 million towards the fellowships. The 30 awardees this year were selected from a pool of 1443 applicants based on their potential to make significant contributions to the U.S. society and education. From the fellowship’s launch, over 100 of 550+ fellows have had Indian heritage.
The Founders – Paul & Daisy Soros
Paul & Daisy Soros – Founders of Fellowship
Paul & Daisy Soros are both Hungarian immigrants. The seed for the fellowship was planted in 1948 when Paul (brother of billionaire investor George Soros) defected the Olympic games in Switzerland as a member of the Hungarian Ski team and came to New York City. Constrained financially, Paul had to abandon his dream of studying at an Ivy League school. Studying Civil Engineering at Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, Paul became a celebrated Civil Engineer, transforming port design worldwide.
Daisy and Paul founded the fellowship with a goal of serving the country that gave them so much and to focus on the need to enable “young New Americans at critical points in their educations.” The fellowships recognize the vast contributions that can be extracted from the diverse population of immigrants. The fellowship has honored 550+ students who have been granted $75 million over the past 18 years. Each student also receives the privilege of becoming a part of a distinguished community with world renowned personalities like U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, leading Ebola researcher Pardis Sabeti, Aspiration founder Andrei Cherny, Oscar health insurance co-founder Kevin Nazemi and 550+ other New American leaders.
Stanford University Leads The Way
The Stanford University with a motto of “the wind of freedom blows” has proven its leadership after seven of its students, belonging to different fields of study, bagged the 2016 Soros Fellowship. The diverse crowd included three medical students, one business student, a doctoral student in physics, an incoming doctoral student in electrical engineering, and an alumna who is studying law at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jenna Nicholas from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB)
Jenna Nicholas, 2016 Soros fellow and Stanford GSB Student (Image Credit: Christopher Smith)
“Change lives. Change organizations. Change the world” is the official slogan of the Stanford GSB and Jenna Nicholas stood as the only MBA student of the prestigious school to bag the Soros Fellowship of 2016. A first year MBA student who came back to the United States for her studies got accepted into the Stanford University for MBA and she felt truly at home. She was born in New York City but spent her formative years in London. She pursued her BA Honors in International Relations at Stanford University. In her freshman year at Stanford, she was enlightened about the pros of investment for social cause and she decided to dedicate her career to the cause. She worked as a Research Assistant at Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society and after graduation worked with Calvert Special Equities – an impact investing fund focused on socially responsible businesses and funds. She was also invited to teach students at the Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, Beijing about responsible investment, business ethics and corporate social responsibility.
Jenna is not only a student but an entrepreneur as well. She was a co-founder of Phoenix Global Impact, a consulting firm that supports leaders in the field of impact investing and generates measurable, beneficial, social, environmental and financial returns. She served as a project manager at Divest-Invest Philanthropy and helped them to grow to more than 150 memberships. Jenna hopes to garner greater pools of capital into socially-minded enterprises.
