October 21, 2013 - 5:26am
Two Vancouver Island University students have a deeper passion for their chosen fields of study after receiving scholarships to support their international internships in Bulgaria and Ecuador.
Brent Whitford, a fourth year Anthropology student, and Megan Kingwill, in her fourth year of a Global Studies major and Anthropology minor at VIU, each received a $6,000 Premier’s International Scholarship to fund internships taken this past summer.
Kingwill spent the summer as a community development intern with the Arajuno Road Project, a small non-profit organization working with rural schools on the edge of the Amazon in Ecuador.
“My experience in Ecuador has not only affirmed passions I already had for food security and community development, but also initiated a strong interest in Latin American culture and politics,” Kingwill said. “I am hoping to pursue this through research during my final year at VIU, and at a Master's level in the coming years.”
In her Latin American internship, Kingwill developed guidance materials for the organization, built and maintained school gardens with community members, developed experimental permaculture plots to be used by schools and families, and met with government officials to request resources for the schools.
Whitford travelled to Bulgaria for a 10-week internship last summer to supervise archaeological digs and groups of students in an Early Neolithic settlement along the Struma River Valley. It was his second trip to the site, as he spent a month there in the summer of 2012 on a Study Abroad experience.
“I’m attempting to specialize in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for archaeology methods,” Whitford says. “My project has been developing the methods for documenting the excavation of our archaeological sites, using GIS. My time abroad consisted mostly of data collection, and now that I have that data, I’m putting it all together.”
Whitford has always nurtured an interest in pre-history and archaeology, but it wasn’t until he was 24 and working for his ninth year as a cook in Ontario that he decided to pursue studies in that field.
“I was sitting at home watching a documentary on the Maya, and noticed for the first time that the person speaking on television had a job title under his name,” he says. “No joke, the following day I applied to VIU for an Anthropology major, and I’ve been there ever since.”
One of Whitford’s mentors in his internship, the curator of the Blagoevgrad Regional Museum of History, has offered him an opportunity to return to Bulgaria next summer once he has graduated. He will have the chance to review information collected on an excavation that began in the late 1970s, digitize maps used at the dig sites, and publish the results of his analyses.
“I’m pretty certain I’m going to go into a Master’s in GIS applications and work with archaeology sites,” he says. “Then I’ll go into a PhD in archaeology.”
Premier’s International Scholarships, offered by the Irving K. Barber British Columbia Scholarship Society for study abroad, are funded from the returns on a $15 million endowment fund established by the Province of B.C. for international education.
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MEDIA CONTACT:
Shari Bishop Bowes, Communications Officer, Vancouver Island University
P:250.740.6443 C: 250.618.1535 E: Communications@viu.ca T: @viunews
Tags: In the Community
