Associate Professor Guilain Denoeux (government) was stunned in April when he received word that both of Colby’s nominees, seniors William Barndt and Jennifer McElhinny, were offered fellowships at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Stunned not because either was undeserving; stunned, rather, that one small college corralled 20 percent of the fellowship program—two of 10 positions—competing against nominees from Harvard, Stanford, Yale and other top colleges and universities.
The Carnegie Endowment’s 10 junior fellows spend a year working on programs in international affairs. Barndt (Quakertown, Pa.) will work in the democracy project; McElhinny (San Francisco, Calif.) will work on international migration policy. McElhinny had accepted a Peace Corps assignment in Jordan and wangled a deferral despite the Corps’ “no deferrals” policy; Barndt has a full-scholarship to Princeton’s Ph.D. program in politics, which he postponed despite the university’s similar policy.
At Colby both students were involved in Denoeux’s democracy-assessment research. McElhinny, a government and anthropology major, evaluated democratic characteristics of Morocco’s constitutional monarchy. Barndt, who majored in government and international studies, studied in Chile and did research in Bolivia.
Though the two occupy different stations on the political continuum, according to Barndt, they are friends and there was no rivalry in the competition. When the Carnegie endowment contacted them this spring, each was nervous about upsetting the other with the news. “We didn’t talk to each other for two days,” McElhinny said. “The best part about it is that Will and I both got it.”
