Brett Karpf ’26 walks to make sense of the world. He walks because he loves to walk. And he walks because he has to, for reasons he’s still trying to understand. Beginning in August, fully funded by a fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, Karpf will spend a full year walking — and thinking about walking. His proposal, “Seeking Meaning in Motion,” was one of 39 winning projects out of 155 Watson finalists nationally. �ֲ���ý is one of 40 participating colleges that can nominate up to four students each year. 

Karpf, who grew up in and around New York City, cannot remember a time when he was not in motion. Shuttling by car, subway, and bus from place to place, movement settled him. It was when he began attending a summer camp just an hour away from �ֲ���ý that he really began to understand how motion felt different when he was walking. 

“When you’re moving slowly, you’re constantly being met with new stimuli, such that your mind is refreshing at a natural pace,” Karpf says. “As opposed to, for example, when you’re in a car, you’re passing by everything so that it’s hard to focus on any one thing.”

When he arrived at �ֲ���ý, he took to walking across Lewiston every night after dinner. “It was an incredible way for me to get to know the place,” he says. “It grants you a level of intimacy that otherwise is kind of hard to reach. You’re more autonomous in what it is that you’re observing. It also allowed me to find my own place within �ֲ���ý.”

Karpf, an English major who frequently drops lines from various texts to tell a story of his own, is inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s writing about walking. Thoreau celebrated what he called
“sauntering,” derived from sans terre meaning “without land or a home.” To Thoreau, sans terre means “having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.” 

Karpf plans to “saunter” through seven countries, spending time with a cooperative of herders in Mongolia, Zen Buddhists in Japan, semi-nomadic Sámi reindeer herders in Sweden, and others. He will also visit Australia, Norway, Nepal and India, each of which has a culture attached to movement. Karpf will bring his curiosity to more deeply understand the role of walking within those cultures, while self-examining his own motivations. 

“I think in some part what I’m hoping for is a comfort in stillness. At the end of it, I’d like to have a sense that I can settle down a little bit.”

Karpf was encouraged to apply for the Watson after spending time with friend and fellow Watson finalist Poppy Marsh ’26 of San Francisco, Calif., on an Otis Fellowship in 2024. That experience — framing a project, moving through the application, and then visiting the Dolomites — informed his Watson application and his initial interview. The �ֲ���ý Watson fellowship committee, led by Robert Strong, director of national fellowships, saw that this was a strong project.

“Brett’s Watson project intrigued the �ֲ���ý committee because it is internally tuned but seeking externally as well,” Strong says. “Throughout his application process, Brett was reaching to articulate something just beyond the reach of words — but something he feels and knows when walking.” 

Working to harness an idea beyond the reach of words and turn it into an actionable plan, Karpf knew he would need support. Each of �ֲ���ý’ four Watson finalists was paired with a �ֲ���ý mentor, and Andrew Mountcastle, associate professor of biology, was Karpf’s. 

“His research project was just totally organic to who he is as a person and authentic to him,” Mountcastle says. “We saw that right away in both his written material as well as his interview process.” 

In addition to serving on the Watson committee for �ֲ���ý, Mountcastle has a special perspective on the Watson. Following his own college graduation, he won a Watson fellowship and used it to study different cultural responses to sea mammal beachings in seven countries. And while he did learn about the question at hand, he learned the most about himself, which made him uniquely qualified to help Karpf with the messier questions about a year away from home.

“At first glance, the Watson feels very outward,” Mountcastle says. “You’re traveling to different countries, doing a self-designed project. You’re exploring the world. But I think the lasting impact on me was what was happening internally.”

The duo met almost weekly, leading up to the interviews with the Watson Foundation in December. “We’d talk about his latest draft,” Mountcastle says. “He’d get really excited about different angles and exploring different potential components of his project. And then he’d disappear for a week and spend all his time writing.” 

Karpf also went into the application process with the support of Associate Professor of English Sanford Freedman, who has come to know Karpf well over his four years at �ֲ���ý. In addition to working together on Karpf’s senior honors thesis on William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Karpf helps Danielle Freedman, Sanford’s wife, with her gardens. 

“Brett Karpf’s powerful ability is to speak to people at all levels,” Freedman says. “What may go unnoticed is the capacity of what he brings to these exchanges: friendship, hope, goodwill, and an amazing perspicacious consciousness registering and analyzing life exchanges.”

As Karpf begins to plan the year ahead in earnest, he is humbled by this opportunity. “Motion is a great privilege. An American passport is a great privilege. A lot of people can’t go as easily around the world as I’ll be able to, and many people can’t even leave their own neighborhood.” Karpf is also aware of the opportunities that have opened up for him because he was in a community that encouraged him, at a school that supported him. Faculty and staff, but also fellow students, helped Karpf feel like his questions were worth asking. 

The one thing that he wants to tell �ֲ���ý students as his time comes to a close? 

“Apply to stuff! One reason I got this Watson is because I had applied for other things at �ֲ���ý, whether that be the Otis Fellowship or an environmental grant.” One experience leads to confidence to apply for the next. And support from the Otis family will continue to help Karpf on the roads ahead. “The Otis family helped fund my summer last year where I was working on the Allagash doing trail work and made it possible for me to purchase gear,” including a pair of boots that will carry him across seven countries in the coming year. 

“I love these boots, by the way,” he says. “Though I may have to get them re-soled again.”

Four �ֲ���ý seniors are hoping to get the chance to spend the next year seeking answers to some big questions. Finalists for the Watson Fellowship, these students are exploring differing approaches to work across cultures, persistent traditions amid changing political boundaries, how meaning can be made from movement, and community-driven approaches to power grids.

The Watson Fellowship offers college graduates support to travel for a full year exploring a complex topic. Fellows receive $40,000 along with health insurance and a year’s worth of student loan payments (if needed). In exchange, they must remain outside of the United States for a full year, beginning in the August following their college graduation.

“This is some version of heaven,” said Robert Strong, director of national fellowships. “The Watson allows �ֲ���ýies to spend a year traveling the earth constrained only by the limits of their curiosities, which Watson believes should be limitless.” �ֲ���ý is one of 41 colleges and universities that can nominate students. Each institution is allowed to nominate up to four students from within their own highly competitive pool. The last time �ֲ���ý students were awarded a Watson was in 2023, when two �ֲ���ý seniors, and , received the prestigious fellowships.

This year �ֲ���ý has four nominees: Poppy Marsh ’26 of San Francisco, Calif., John Harun-DeLong ’26 of Fairbanks, Alaska; Brett Karpf ’26 of Ridgewood, N.J., and Linh Hoang ’26 of Hanoi, Vietnam. And if awarded, their travels could span 19 countries — from Nepal to Norway to New Zealand.

We caught up with these four finalists, to learn more about what they hope to accomplish if they receive a Watson. Poppy Marsh, a double major in English and politics, has proposed a project to explore identity and community among those impacted by political borders in five countries. Marsh was an Otis Fellow in 2024 and spent eight weeks in the Italian Dolomites, hiking and talking to people about climate change and environmental degradation. Marsh sees the Watson as “the grandparent of the Otis,” with a longer time frame, larger scope, and increased independence on the part of the fellow. For the Watson, she explains, “I’m curious about individual and communal conceptions of identity as it relates to the invention of the modern state through, around, and between communities whose presence on this land predates the state’s modern borders. So my project is thinking about this through distinct methods of cultural, linguistic, and social preservations of these communal identities as they relate to the land that they’ve remained on.”

Marsh’s interdisciplinarity shows up in her work at �ֲ���ý. Her politics thesis, which is “a comparative study of the refugee accommodation regimes in Greece and Kenya,” focuses on policy differences in shifting communities. Her year-long poetry thesis allows another way to explore questions of place. “For that, I’m interested in ideas of homeland, ideas of what it means to come from a place and no longer be with it or what it means to come from a place and remain with it.” 

Marsh’s idea for the Watson builds on questions of belonging, but never aims to find answers or offer solutions. “I’m not really after a specific political or social definition. I’m not interested in proving a rightful belonging to land or affirming a rightful belonging to land. That’s so far from my place. What I want is structured around open-ended curiosity. I want it to be stretchy. I want it to be bent and folded and contradicted. I want it to be able to hold water and leak as well, depending on where I am.” 

Marsh credits her first-year seminar professor and advisor, Senem Aslan, professor of politics, for her growing enthusiasm and curiosity about these questions. Aslan has been Marsh’s advisor all four years and has encouraged Marsh to move toward these goals. 

John Harun-DeLong ’26 of Fairbanks, Alaska, could have selected any number of big questions to follow for his proposed year abroad. He is a cellist, on the debate team, and majoring in biochemistry with minors in philosophy and Hispanic Studies. But within those varied interests is a throughline:  “Climate change is what really drives me. I need to think of it. For me, my life isn’t just my own body. It’s like my entire community of Alaska and my hometown. And so the destruction of that is fundamental. Everything that shaped you, if those are being destroyed, that’s the most complete destruction of the self that can exist, really.”

Though he aims to work toward a MD/PhD in the future, Harun-DeLong first wants to spend time understanding, and comparing, power grids around the world to work toward more sustainable and safer solutions for the U.S.. 

His plan is to travel to countries with a decentralized power grid or microgrids that are more resilient than the aging – and vulnerable – grid in the U.S. It isn’t only the science that interests Harun-DeLong. These microgrids also “allow [citizens] to have truly democratic control over the grid because the people in the village are supposed to maintain and decide what the best grid policy is.” 

There’s a precedent for Harun-DeLong to figure it out as he goes, and find opportunities along the way. Last summer, when Harun-DeLong knew that he wanted to work with some of the top cancer researchers in the world, he cold-called them. He showed up in Spain and ended up working as a research assistant for Maria Blasco, director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center. 

Linh Hoang ’26 of Hanoi, Vietnam was traveling in Svalbard, Norway, when she met a stranger who changed her life. In a shared kitchen, over instant ramen, Hoang struck up a conversation with a man who explained his own big questions. He had spent the past two decades in constant motion, always striving through work to reach the next rung on the ladder. He suddenly stopped and asked himself: “What do I actually want?” That reflection struck Hoang as she was busy working toward her own future. Why wait for a mid-life break to ask this question? Talking to friends across the globe who are building lives in a time of uncertainty, Hoang believes that it is worth pausing to notice how various cultures respond to and help shape relationships to work. 

Hoang’s Watson project emphasizes existential questions and places her generation in a broader context of work culture. “From my Watson, I will learn how people across cultures navigate the same tensions I’ve felt: between ambition and meaning, belonging and freedom, expectation and reality. I will return with a deeper understanding of how systems and emotions intertwine, and with the humility to know that both matter.” 

Those who know Hoang as a double major in math and economics might be surprised that she is focusing on philosophical questions. Hoang’s understanding of economics will certainly impact the questions that she asks, but she really is interested in a more personal approach in her travels. Hoang’s proposal lays out a plan to visit nine countries in the coming year. 

Hoang is already making plans to pursue graduate work that bridges math and finance. She isn’t on the fence about her next steps, and she does not see the Watson as “opting out.” Instead, she is remembering the stranger in Norway reflecting on his life and his choices. And in framing these questions comparatively in cultures both known for their high-pressure or their laid-back approaches to work, Hoang is certain to move toward her next phase with more understanding. “What I’ve found,” Hoang says, ”is that when I talk to more people, I learn more about myself.“ 

Brett Karpf ’26 of Ridgewood, N.J. spends a lot of time walking. Whether covering hundreds of miles along trails in Italy on his Otis Fellowship, wandering through urban Morocco during study abroad or simply moving from place to place in Maine, walking gives meaning to his life. As he has grown and reflected more on the role of motion in his own life, he has begun asking more questions about walking and movement, such as “Why is it that moving, walking especially, can enable us to gain a better sense of faith or understanding or contentedness?” 

An English major, Karpf is deeply engaged in analyzing words; his two-semester thesis project explores sublimity in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! But Karpf has also served as an assistant to �ֲ���ý horticulturalist Jeremy Lavertu and worked as a gardener for Sanford Freedman, associate professor of English. His proposal for the Watson allows him to combine his love of the natural world with his analytical skills as he works to understand what happens for people who spend time walking outside. 

Though Karpf’s experiences walking have been selective and intentional, he is drawn to nomadic cultures whose very existence is tied to movement. “I’m looking for similarities and oppositions between different groups. You can find so much cultural similarity between places that are thousands of miles apart, if not tens of thousands of miles apart, and who are using motion to sort of reach similar ends.”

Karpf will explore people who walk for various reasons, including religious pilgrims. He hopes to learn “by interacting with people who are walking as a means of religious observance or as a way to become closer with what they deem to be divine.” The project will also explore “cultures where motion and movement are prioritized — herders, semi-nomadic peoples, including people that used to be nomadic and no longer are,” in order to understand the drive to hold to traditions that are increasingly threatened.

Karpf hopes to find meaningful answers — and at minimum, answers that help him understand himself more. “I am seeking how others experience purpose and understanding when it feels deeply entangled with movement: Can their experience help me understand my own?”

A �ֲ���ý graduate from Chicago is one of 50 students across the country to receive a 2008 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, a $25,000 grant that supports a year of independent research abroad.

Jordan Williams, who graduated from �ֲ���ý in December 2007, will use the award to research the graffiti cultures in Germany, Brazil and South Africa.

The Watson Fellowship is designed to identify potential leaders and challenge them in ways that foster independence, a global perspective and adaptability to new cultures. It funds research on a topic deeply important to the recipient and conducted outside the formal academic environment and the recipient’s home culture. This year’s fellows come from 23 states and five foreign countries.

Titled “Graffn’ Legitimacy: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender and the Real Writer,” Williams’ research will take him among graffiti writers in Germany, South Africa and Brazil. He will look at the factors — political, social, racial, gender — that shape those diverse graffiti cultures.

Williams is interested in understanding how writers’ motivations and styles vary and how race and gender mediate their experiences in the three countries. In particular, he will examine the tension between people who write graffiti in legally designated zones and those who believe that the only “real” writers are those who do it illegally.

“Most writers are opposed to graffiti that exclusively utilizes legal avenues because they feel as if these conditions turn graffiti, which emphasizes commitment, dedication and political disruption, into an afternoon hobby,” he writes in his Watson proposal.

The advent of “legal walls,” he writes, has created a tendency to identify female writers with legal graffiti, implying that “many male writers believe women are mostly producing graffiti that is not ‘real,’ and male writers who exclusively produce legal graffiti are not real men.”

“The fact that this whole issue of ‘realness’ is predicated on the illegality issue is a little bit of a problem,” Williams says in an interview. “It tends to exclude parties that are contributing to the culture. It seems to create a situation where it’s like a boys club, a hypermasculine thing.”

How did Williams settle on Germany, South Africa and Brazil for his research? Germany, he says, is a world graffiti center. It has a well-established and robust writing culture that gains additional interest from the Berlin Wall’s history in the 1970s and ’80s as a politically charged canvas for graffiti writers.

“South Africa’s just on the way up” as a graffiti culture, he explains, and its history of apartheid deepens the role of race in shaping that culture.

Finally, Brazil “has this completely different graffiti style from anywhere else in the world, and it incorporates a lot of what I take as indigenous types of characters and artwork,” he says. “It’s really interesting to see how it’s taking shape in a different area.”

Williams, who double-majored in women and gender studies and in African American studies at �ֲ���ý, was inspired to pursue this topic during a trip to Paris in summer 2006. He chose that city as a promising place to conduct research for his �ֲ���ý senior thesis, intending to study the relationship between rap music and outbreaks of rioting by teenagers in some of the city’s poor suburbs in 2005.

“Then I got to France and my eyes were just drawn to all these graffiti on the walls,” he says. “It was just something that was really magnetic. And so I decided, the first day there, to switch thesis topics.” Williams ended up investigating the French context for some of the same issues he hopes to explore in the Watson research.

“I only started learning about graffiti at all that summer,” he says. “I’ve really immersed myself in since then.”

A program of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, of Providence, R.I., the Watson Fellowship was established in 1968 by the wife and children of Thomas J. Watson Sr., the founder of IBM.

At least one �ֲ���ý senior received a Watson Fellowship every year from 1985 through 2000. �ֲ���ý students or graduates also received Watsons in 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007.

Spending up to eight months of the year in transit, arctic terns “migrate farther than any other bird — 40,000 kilometers every year,” says Andrew Stowe. “The length and duration of that migration is just absolutely mind-boggling and something I’ve been fascinated by. They can live up to 35 years, so you’re talking about a lot of distance covered and a lot of the world seen.”

The birds breed in Canada during the boreal (northern) summer and spend the austral summer feeding in Antarctica, thereby maximizing their exposure to daylight. Stowe will cover the migration route in parallel with the terns, tracing a course around the Atlantic Rim from Canada to the United Kingdom, down to South Africa, possibly stopping in Antarctica, and then returning through South America and the Caribbean. He’ll visit more than a dozen countries during his Watson year.

“I’m going to need clothes for every latitude on the planet,” he says.

He’ll devote his time to field work, observing and counting the birds, and will also conduct interviews in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Ecuador and Canada as he investigates how national environmental policies affect the terns’ fortunes.

“The scope of what the terns accomplish, as a scientific phenomenon, is almost too broad for science itself,” Stowe says, simply because of the great distances they cover. “Thinking about what the Watson is geared for, I thought that would be a really cool thing to attempt.”

“It’s a moment of intense satisfaction, knowing that I can actually find these birds and get to know them as well as possible.”

Tom Ewell, recently retired executive director of the Maine Council of Churches and an activist in many peace and justice arenas, will give a lecture and present the annual William Stringfellow Awards in Justice and Peace at 7 p.m. Friday, March 31, in Chase Hall Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave., �ֲ���ý College. Sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain, the talk and a potluck dinner that begins at 6 p.m. are open to the public free of charge. Call 207-786-8272 for more information.

A leader in the 2005 effort to ensure that all Maine citizens are protected by law from discrimination based on sexual orientation, Ewell will give a lecture titled, Nonviolence: Let the Revolution Roll On. The lecture honors the legacy of William Stringfellow, �ֲ���ý class of 1949, a lawyer and lay theologian prominent in the American peace movement, and coincides with the 2006 William Stringfellow Awards for Justice and Peace, to be presented this year to �ֲ���ý senior Amanda Harrow of Hopkinton, Mass., and Lewiston resident Jake Grindle, a Maine People’s Alliance community organizer for the Androscoggin Valley region.

Harrow will graduate this May with a degree in psychology. She recently received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, a prestigious one-year $25,000 grant awarded to graduating college seniors for independent study and travel outside of the United States. Harrow will investigate strategies for protecting children from abuse in New Zealand, Peru, Sweden and Uganda.

An organizer at �ֲ���ý of the New World Coalition and the Women’s Resource Center, and a member of the �ֲ���ý Emergency Medical Services board, Harrow has been active in various social justice groups in Lewiston-Auburn. Involved with various campaigns such as Maine Won’t Discriminate and community groups, including the Coalition of Many and One, she has worked extensively to promote gender equality and redress the consequences of inequality through her work with the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project, the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women and RAINN, the national sexual assault hotline.

International travel has offered Harrow a new perspective from which to view the actions of the United States, she says, and fundamentally changed her understanding of U.S. global policy. Most recently, Harrow studied in Bolivia for six months, where she found great inspiration in the courage and activism of indigenous people. As a result, she has spent significant time in the last year working on issues connected to the region. Her latest project, planned for April 2006, is organizing a �ֲ���ý student-led exploration of globalization “on the ground” in Maine and Nicaragua.

While growing up, Harrow’s family cared for numerous foster children, which “instilled in me respect and compassion for all forms of life,” she says. “As I grew, I learned more about the root causes of poverty, violence and social and environmental degradation and became convinced of the need for change at the structural level,” she says. Harrow is the daughter of Sheryl MacGowan Harrow, �ֲ���ý Class of 1975, and Ed Harrow of Hopkinton, Mass.

Jake Grindle grew up in Pownal and attended Greely High School in Cumberland. He received his B.A. in sociology and anthropology from the University of Maine at Farmington.  He has worked on U.S. Senate campaigns, multiple ballot initiatives, statewide healthcare and environmental legislation, the protection of citizen rights and democracy, consumer protection and human rights.

Grindle typically draws inspiration from volunteers and staff he works with.  He has supervised one of the largest voter registration campaigns in Maine history, which registered more than 12,000 new voters, one door at a time, in summer 2004.  In 2005, he supervised a very successful door-to-door canvass bringing the message of community and mutual responsibility to the debate over Social Security.  Both of these door-to-door efforts were led by �ֲ���ý students.

Grindle’s proudest accomplishment as an organizer, he says, is his role with a group of downtown Lewiston residents who challenged Lewiston’s Heritage Initiative, an urban renewal plan to put a highway through downtown. Picking up on the theme of the invisibility of local residents and their needs in Lewiston’s planning processes, members launched a “Visible Community” campaign, rallying residents to challenge the proposal and promote alternatives.

Grindle lives in Lewiston with his wife.

The $22,000 award will support a year of travel and research in Senegal and Romania, where Drake will study how political and social change has affected artistic production and funding for the fine arts.

The Thomas J. Watson Foundation this year considered 185 candidates nominated by 49 private, liberal arts colleges noted for their quality and commitment to undergraduate education.

�ֲ���ý history professor Dennis Grafflin, the Thomas J. Watson liaison officer for �ֲ���ý and the chair of the college’s Watson Committee, said that the fellowship program, now in its 31st year, “is unique in its concern for giving recent college graduates an opportunity to develop an interest anywhere else in the world, outside the framework of academic or occupational responsibilities. It is the most long-term sort of investment in human capital, seeking to expand its fellows’ sense of their own capacities as people who will lead and change the world.”

The Thomas J. Watson Fellowship Program seeks to recognize individuals who demonstrate integrity, strong ethical character, intelligence, the capacity for vision and leadership and potential for humane and effective participation in the world community.

Drake, an art history and French double major at �ֲ���ý, has written her senior honors thesis on “Jacques de la Villegle’s Affiches Lacerees: (Recomposing) Shreds of Consumerism, Primitivism and Popular Culture in mid 20th Century France.” A member of the �ֲ���ý concert choir and the chamber singers, Drake performed works by Bach, Mozart and Faure for her senior voice recital and was soprano soloist in a spring performance of Mozart’s “Requiem.”

During her junior year abroad, Drake studied French in Tours, France, and art history at Parisian universities. The summer after her junior year abroad, Drake returned to Lewiston, where she served as a marketing and public relations intern with the United Way of Androscoggin County in �ֲ���ý’ Ladd Internship program. She received the college’s Charles A. Dana Scholar Award in 1996 for leadership and academic excellence.

Drake, the daughter of Robert and Nancy Drake of Granville, is a 1995 graduate of Granville High School.