OUR STUDENTS

Forrest Schoessow
A PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and recipient of a Sharpe Innovation Commons Seed Grant, Forrest Schoessow has learned about the Earth by exploring its diverse landscapes and studying the intersections of nature and humanity. He has scaled mountains around the globe and once voyaged the length of the Mississippi River via canoe. He leads the Mountain Drone Team at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, and last summer, he studied glacier retreat exacerbated by climate change in the Andes Mountains.

Cindy Tran Nguyen
Based on the 2001 book-turned-movie starring Reese Witherspoon, the Broadway musical Legally Blonde took the stage at Ohio State last fall. Cindy Tran Nguyen, a theatre and marketing double major, played the lead role of Elle Woods, a California sorority girl turned Harvard Law student. “When I was growing up," she said, "I didn’t have anybody to look up to in terms of media and movies and YouTube — none of them were Asian. I wasn’t able to see myself in this career at all, and when I picked up theatre, I was thinking, ‘I’m going to make an impact on the stage.’”

Rachel Miller
Rachel Miller, a PhD student in the Department of English, is researching girlhood, media and pop culture in the 1990s. Her dissertation focuses on the specific space of girls’ bedrooms, which she argues are archives of cultural and feminist history. “This project really started as an ode to my teenage bedroom," she said. "While lots of scholars look at this media in isolation, I wanted to think about this ecosystem as a whole.” Miller was a recipient of the university’s 2018 Presidential Fellowships, the most prestigious award given by Ohio State’s Graduate School. Two-thirds of fellowships went to Arts and Sciences students.

Caroline Jipa & Vilas Winstein
Arts and Sciences students Caroline Jipa, double major in chemistry and physics, and Vilas Winstein, double major in mathematics and computer information science, were named 2019 Goldwater Scholars by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program. Jipa hopes to earn an MD/PhD in biophysics to research cellular pathways for regenerative medicine using biophysics techniques. Winstein aims to earn a PhD and conduct research in quantum algebra and quantum topology.

Sesquicentennial Scholars
In honor of its 150th anniversary, Ohio State awarded 150 scholarships to students for the 2019-20 academic year. Of those, 32 students come from the College of Arts and Sciences. The Sesquicentennial Student Scholar Leadership Program demonstrates a commitment to increasing access and affordability while recognizing students’ academic and non-academic accomplishments and diverse interests.