Opeyemi Awe '15 Earns Watson Fellowship

Opeyemi Awe '15 of Germantown, Maryland, has been awarded a prestigious Watson Fellowship for one year of independent study and travel abroad. Awe, an international affairs major originally from Nigeria, is one of only 50 students nationwide to receive the $30,000 fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation.

Awe will use her Watson Fellowship to travel to Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, Rwanda and South Korea, and will explore how entrepreneurship has contributed to the economic development of each country. "I want to contextualize the economic growth of these nations in cultural, economic and historical terms," she says. "I also want to explore how evenly — or unevenly — that growth has been distributed."

Awe, who serves as president of the Student Government Association, originally came to Grinnell  intending to major in chemistry. But after an internship in Ghana with 2011 Grinnell Prize winner Challenging Heights, she turned her focus to international economic development. "I developed an interest in a more analytical view of the world," she says. As a Mellon Mays fellow, Awe is working on a project that relates migration patterns to entrepreneurial success in sub-Saharan African countries.

After her Watson year, Awe plans to enter the workforce for several years and then attend graduate school to continue her studies of international political economies.