Hope College junior Alicia Bostwick of Zionsville, Indiana, has received a highly competitive scholarship from the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.
A total of 496 scholarships were awarded by the Board of Trustees of the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, in partnership with the Department of Defense National Defense Education Programs, to undergraduate sophomores and juniors. The Goldwater Scholars were selected on the basis of academic merit from among 1,223 natural-science, engineering and mathematics students who were nominated by the institutional representatives of 443 colleges and universities nationwide.
The scholarships are for one or two years, depending on the recipient’s year in school, and cover the cost of tuition, mandatory fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.
Numerous Hope students have received scholarships through the years, including 10 across the past decade.
Bostwick is majoring in biology. Her career goal is to pursue a doctorate in biochemistry and conduct biomedical research focusing on causes of and treatments for human diseases such as asthma, allergies or cancer.
She has been participating in collaborative faculty-student research since the beginning of her freshman year, when she was a participant in the year-long Day1: Phage course. Since May 2017, she has been conducting research during both the school year and summer with Dr. Kristin Dittenhafer-Reed, assistant professor of chemistry.
In May 2018, Bostwick received a summer undergraduate research award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. That same spring, Hope named her a Beckman Scholar through the college’s Beckman Scholars Program award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, providing support for her to conduct research during the summers of 2018 and 2019 as well as the school year in between. This spring, she received the college’s Undergraduate Award for Achievement in Biochemistry.
Her activities at Hope also include women’s cross country and track and field. She is a 2016 graduate of Zionsville Community High School.
The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established by Public Law 99-661 on November 14, 1986. The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. The Goldwater Scholarship is the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields. Since its first award in 1989, the foundation has bestowed 8.628 scholarships totaling more than $68 million.