Years later, Baylor grads share where Fulbright, Truman & other scholarships have taken them
Scholarship programs like the Fulbright, Truman, and Goldwater are among the most prestigious (and competitive) in the nation. Baylor set a school record last year with 14 Fulbright recipients, recorded its first Truman Scholar in 15 years, and added to that list Goldwater, Critical Language, Churchill and Boren award winners.
Such honors are great starts for Baylor graduates who have been prepared for worldwide leadership and service. But where do these students go after winning the awards?
Baylor Magazine tracked down six international scholarship winners from the last 20 years to see what life has been like since graduation. From law and government service to higher education and healthcare, here’s a look at where these prestigious scholarships have taken Baylor grads:
* Dr. Jamie Gianoutsos (BS ’06) earned a Marshall Scholarship as a Baylor senior that allowed her to pursue both a master’s in English from the Queen’s University in Belfast and a master’s in political thought and intellectual history from the University of Cambridge. Today, Gianoutsos is an associate professor of history and director of the office of competitive fellowships at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland.
* John Hill (BA ’04) won a Truman Scholarship that took him to Harvard Law School. After graduation, Hill spent 10 years with the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., including a stint as chief of the Superior Court Division, overseeing the largest division of attorneys of any U.S. Attorney’s Office in the country. Today, he serves as senior counsel at Boeing Space and Launch.
* Dr. Kristin Kan (BA ’05) won a Truman Scholarship the year after Hill and headed to medical school, earning an additional graduate degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University. Today, Kan serves as an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and practices as a pediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago.
* Dr. Jade Connor (BS ’17) had already studied abroad in The Netherlands before winning a Fulbright Scholarship; the honor gave her the opportunity to return to Maastricht University and study public health before going on to medical school at Harvard. Today, Connor is completing her internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
* For Ross Natividad (BA ’10, MA ’12), winning a Fulbright after completing his master’s at Baylor meant a chance to teach English at a high school in Indonesia for a year. From there, Natividad earned his law degree at William & Mary; clerked in courts in Virginia, San Antonio and Fort Worth; and now serves as an assistant chief counsel for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
* Ashley Killough (BA ’09) spent 10 months studying in Armenia after earning her Fulbright, an experience that helped her refine her interests. She then graduated from Columbia Journalism School in New York City and went to work for CNN. Killough (pictured bottom right) was embedded with Jeb Bush and then Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election, and is now back in Texas as a field producer for CNN’s Dallas bureau.
Connor sums up what these sorts of experiences — both at Baylor, and beyond — can mean:
“I think Baylor gave me such a wide breadth of experience that I bring to my role right now. Things that I learned in Great Texts, I apply to patients. Things that I learned in Intro to Christian Scriptures and communication classes and even basic biology classes, I still apply to patients now. I think having that wide breadth of experiences helps me to develop and be a better person, one who’s aware and attuned and empathetic to the multitudes of experiences that people bring to the hospital with them.
“That’s one of the things that I learned throughout my classes at Baylor — how to be an advocate for people who are suffering, but then also how to be present at the same time. I’m just really grateful to Baylor for that, because I think I was surrounded by people — both faculty mentors and peers — who were just so lovely and so intentional. I learned how to be as intentional in all my relationships and all my capacities, but especially in medicine and being someone’s doctor.”
Sic ’em, Baylor scholarship recipients!
[Pictured above: Top, L-R: Kan, Gianoutsos, Hill; Bottom, L-R: Natividad, Connor, Killough. Hear more from each of these Bears in this Fall 2022 Baylor Magazine feature.]