Making the International Intentional

When Opeyemi Awe ’15 was a student at Grinnell, she did not shy away from getting involved. Senator, vice president for student affairs, and president of the Student Government Association? Check. Summer internships with the U.S. Department of State and a global strategy consulting firm? Check. Feature on MSNBC’s Women in Politics: College Edition? Check.

After four years immersed in a whirlwind of activity and achievement, “I was overwhelmed,” Awe says. “I didn’t know what my next reasonable step would be.”

An Opportunity To Explore the World — and the Self

Rather than immediately pursuing a career or a graduate degree, Awe applied for and won the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. The Watson offers graduating seniors a $30,000 stipend to spend a year pursuing an original project through international travel.

Awe, an independent major in international affairs, chose to study the role of entrepreneurship in global economic development. Over the course of a year, her project took her to 11 countries across the world, including South Korea, Indonesia, Rwanda, and Brazil.

Watson fellowships are self-designed and directed, with few restrictions on how fellows may structure their time or pursue their project of interest. Beyond exploring international economics — something Awe cares deeply about — the Watson provided an opportunity for Awe to explore herself.

“If I had to boil Watson down into a sentence,” Awe says, “it would be an opportunity to explore who you are when everything that you know has been stripped away from you.

“I asked myself questions and challenged my own identities in ways that I never would have been able to had I worked or gone to grad school right away.”

Institutions and Evolution

Through her travels, Awe also deepened her understanding of the institutions that surround us, at home and abroad.

She came to appreciate their interconnections. “In every place that I went, I could not understand the economic system without talking about the political system,” Awe says.

In Brazil, she witnessed the fiscal corruption scandal that led to the impeachment and removal of President Dilma Rousseff. “People were definitely angry, and they were protesting” she says. “But they also had an attitude of, ‘Well, at least we know that the country is not going to implode.’ In Brazil of the ’60s and ’70s, this could have kicked them into another coup. Now, Brazilians are saying, ‘Isn’t this the point of having institutions? Isn’t this the point of having a legislature?’”

Awe also visited Indonesia and Rwanda, where the political and economic foundations were much less stable. Taken together, these global perspectives helped her process the tumultuous U.S. election season. “The one thing I know is that America will not implode,” Awe says. “Democracy will not stop reigning.”

She also gained an appreciation for when it is appropriate and effective to blow systems up and rebuild from scratch. Awe describes Rwanda as a particularly compelling example:

“Everything that could have gone wrong in Rwanda, has,” she says. “Beyond being resource limited, they had the 1994 genocide, which was a very violent response to their broken, failed institutions. But 22 years later, Rwanda has rebuilt. Now, their institutions — infrastructure, healthcare, schools — are functioning much better than institutions in other African countries.”

These insights and experiences provided Awe with a new lens to consider how Grinnell as an institution might address some of its issues. “I realized that institutions do not exist by default,” she says. “They are the way that they are because people put in structures and systems to facilitate movement in a certain direction.

“That’s inspiring, because at Grinnell, we’re not resource-constrained in a way that a lot of institutions are. We have the power to rebuild structures in a way that works for us.”

Bringing It All Home

Since returning to the United States in August, Awe has worked for Grinnell as a research assistant to Raynard S. Kington, president of the College, and Angela Voos, his chief of staff, vice president for strategic planning, and Title IX coordinator.

Awe has also recently launched a YouTube channel, “Ope Sees the World”, in which she explores global issues through her witty, engaging lens. Next up, moving to the Washington, D.C. area to begin working as an analyst for Deloitte Consulting.

Awe’s Watson experience continues to inform each step that she takes.

“Watson provided me an opportunity to pump the brakes and pause on these four very intensive years of my life,” she says. “That has made everything that I do now seem so much more consequential. I can be thoughtful about, ‘Why do I want to work at this job? Why do I care about this issue? Why do I want to go to this place?’”

Learn more about national, merit-based, and Grinnell-specific awards and fellowships, including the Watson Fellowship. For current students, application guidelines and resources can be accessed on GrinnellShare through a secure login.