Issue date: 3/19/04 Section: News

Media Credit: Courtesy Joey Williams Senior Sarah Jacobson throws a coin in the Trevi Fountain in Rome, where her project began.

Senior Sarah Jacobson was awarded a $22,000 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship Grant for a year of self-designed independent study and travel outside the United States after she graduates in May.

Jacobson, a Spanish and Classics double major, is the 22nd Hendrix student to win a Watson Fellowship since 1985. She is one of 50 Watson Fellowship recipients selected this year in a national competition among students from 50 of the nation's leading liberal arts colleges. Hendrix is the only Arkansas institution eligible to nominate its students for Watson Fellowships.

Since 1968, the Fellowship Program has been the major activity of the Watson Foundation. Jeannette K. Watson began the foundation in 1961 to honor her late husband, Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM. The first class of fellows was selected in 1969, and more than 2,000 Watson Fellows have been selected in the 30-year history of the foundation.

"I'm really excited about this opportunity, and it hasn't really sunk in yet," Jacobson said.

When the Foundation released the names of the fellows on its Web site, Jacobson was at home in Texas.

"I wasn't going to check the list until I got back to Hendrix, but I had to check my email and found all these letters from faculty and administrators with 'Congratulations, Watson Fellow!' as the subject line," she said.

Jacobson's plans are to study heritage management, a method of preserving the past while keeping in mind the technologies and needs of today. Her project is titled "Heritage Management and the Search for National and Ethnic Identity."

Jacobson will travel to England in July or August to officially begin her studies. She also plans to travel to Spain, the Ukraine, Mexico and Peru. She said that while she knows what countries she will be visiting, she has not yet finalized the details of her plans, such as where she will stay or whom she will talk to about her project.

"Drawing on a range of fields, heritage management integrates the values of the modern world with the necessity of caring for the past," Jacobson said. "It creates an applicable system for studying, preserving and presenting cultural heritage. Practitioners of heritage management design systems of preservation and presentation that allow for compromise; they recognize the needs of government, business, tourism and industry and also know the value of cultural identity."

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