The Brueggeman Fellows
The Winter-Cohen Family Brueggeman Fellows Program
The Winter-Cohen Family Brueggeman Fellows Program at the Brueggeman Center offers up to 8 students each year the chance to combine a year of independent study with an international immersion experience. The program is highly competitive and draws from graduate and undergraduate students from all four colleges and a wide range of disciplines. Meet the 2022-2023 Brueggeman Fellows.
The students are chosen based upon the strength of their proposal, a sense that they have the maturity to do independent research and travel and the potential for their project to be transformative for them and for others. Students need to have a GPA of 3.0 to apply.
The Fellows Program has three goals:
- Research. Our goal is that the Fellows will acquire deep learning about a topic of their choosing from a global perspective.
- Immersion. The immersion experience is exponentially impactful because each Fellow has to not only plan every aspect of their trip but eventually get off a plane somewhere in the world and deal with what they have created. The totality of the experience is transformative - in ways we can see immediately and in ways that will manifest in unexpected ways in the future.
- Self-Confidence. During every step of the program we work to help students develop a new level of self-confidence by challenging them to conceive, plan and complete a program that begins with a yearlong independent study, followed by an immersion trip to engage in research and service. They must plan every aspect of this trip themselves; create the research network of people and institutions with whom they will work; and plan all the travel, housing and logistics details. This entails managing an ever-changing set of challenges which includes the demands of the research, language acquisition, if necessary; food, illness, transportation, loneliness and cultural adaptation.
To date the Center has sent students to over 60 different countries. Some of these are among the most challenging places on earth.
Each year's cohort is chosen from all four of Xavier's colleges. In addition to an intensive year of research on their individual projects, the Fellows participate in an interdisciplinary learning community with all the other Fellows. The Fellows and their faculty mentors all become each other's teachers.
The program is high risk and high reward. The Center's hope is that the Fellows Program will offer intellectual, moral and spiritual self-discovery and growth that will change the lives of the Fellows in ways they can only begin to imagine.
Take a Risk, Be Transformed—is fundamental to every dialogical encounter and collaborative engagement in which the Center is involved. It is superlatively true of the Fellows Program. To learn about the transformative impact of the Fellows’ experiences in their own words, see Brueggeman Moments.
To apply for the program, complete this application.