Monica Ma is pursuing a masters in Development Studies at the Graduate Institute. She recently graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a major in history and minor in Africa and Middle East Studies. At UCLA, Monica worked for the Fowler Museum, a global arts and culture museum, and interned at the UCLA Center of Middle East Development, where she wrote for the center’s Middle Eastern blog and helped to organise their annual international conferences.

In 2014-15, Monica spent one year studying at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul with funding from the Benjamin E. Gilman scholarship. There she created Young Istanbul, a website comprised of interviews with local subjects, with the goal of fostering cross-cultural exchange and for six months, she taught an ESL class for high school and college-age Syrian refugees in a non-profit school ran by the Association of Syrians in Turkey. This past summer Monica spent two months living in Baku, Azerbaijan, where she continued her Turkish language studies through the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship programme. Monica also speaks fluent Mandarin and Cantonese. At IHEID, she hopes to focus her research on immigration and conflict resolution, with specific regional focus on China, Turkey, and the United States.

The Washington DC Alumni Chapter scholarship has the objective of promoting awareness of the Graduate Institute in the United States and helping the Institute recruit graduate students of high quality. The scholarship is for a first year doctoral or masters student, irrespective of nationality, entering into studies at the Institute from a university in the USA. It is awarded based on academic achievement with economic need as a secondary criterion. There are no restrictions on the section or field of study. The Scholarship is for CHF 18,000.