Seniors Skip From One Cambridge to Another

While Bostonians once poured tea over the side of a ship in defiance of British rule, four Harvard seniors will soon serve tea in England as ambassadors of Anglophonic solidarity.

Four undergraduates—Joey M. Hanzich ’06, Sylvia W. Houghteling ’06, Om L. Lala ’06, and Jonathan A. Blazek ’06—were awarded Harvard-Cambridge Scholarships last Saturday, which will send them in October across the Atlantic to study at Cambridge University.

Hanzich, Houghteling, and Lala plan to pursue Masters of Philosophy (M. Phil) degrees and Blazek said he will pursue a certificate in the advanced study of mathematics in Cambridge, England for one academic year.

They will each receive a stipend of 12,500 pounds, around $22,000, to spend on room and board, for travel to and from England, and for personal expenses.

According to Hanzich, he and the other students will be expected to act as ambassadors for Harvard at Cambridge, hosting teas for their floormates and professors.

“The scholarship gives you a budget to have a tea party in your room,” he said, “and talk to them about Harvard.”

Hanzich, who won the Governor William Shirley Scholarship and will live in Pembroke College, has been involved in the Harvard College Democrats and Relay for Life. He will get his M. Phil in the social and political sciences with a focus on health care quality.

Houghteling, who won the Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholarship and will live in Emmanuel College, is interested in textiles and clothing design. She plans to study India’s history under British rule.

“They never really made you feel you had to highlight any accomplishments,” she said, speaking about the selection committee made up of past scholarship recipients. “They just got to know us really well.”

Houghteling will stay in the room rumored to have been John Harvard’s suite when he was a student at Cambridge University. That story may be more legend than fact, however.

The Harvard Magazine reported in its July/August 2004 issue that Harvard received his bachelor’s degree from Cambridge University in 1632, before the building where her room is located was even built.

And although it is likely that Harvard never lived in the room, it is replete with 75 years of artifacts left by previous scholarship recipients. From age-old furniture to Harvard paraphernalia, alumni have left behind items such as a pewter stein from the Owl Club or Let’s Go travel guides, according to the Harvard Magazine article.

Lala, who won the John Eliot Scholarship and will live in Jesus College, founded the Harvard Interfaith Council as a sophomore and worked in the health policy office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56.

“What I proposed to do in Cambridge was to undertake a interdisciplinary master’s program that focused on the intersection of public health, health policy, and medicine with interfaith dialogue and religious diversity,” he said.

Blazek, who won the Lt. Charles Henry Fiske III Scholarship and will live at Trinity College, is president of the Harvard Glee Club and won the Leo Goldberg prize for his junior thesis about a dense pulsar star. He will pursue a certificate in the advanced study of mathematics, focusing on theoretical physics and applied math but also plans to continue singing. He said that he takes special pride in the fact that Isaac Newton lived in the same College when at Cambridge.

“I also want to row and play cricket and have tea and sherry,” Blazek said.

Members of the selection committee knocked on the winners’ dorm-room doors last Saturday evening to announce the good news—all except for Blazek. In his case, they interrupted his Glee Club rehearsal.

“They had already gotten to Lowell Lecture Hall and talked to one of the assistant conductors about why they were there,” he said. “I came in and sat down. Right after we started singing, the assistant conductor started gesturing. I was really confused until I saw a group of people from the committee walking towards me.”

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.