World Incarceration Exploration

During my last year at Whitman College, about a year ago, I applied for the Watson fellowship. The Watson provides a year long grant for a person to travel outside of the United States. The purpose of the travel is to become involved in, learn about, and engage with a topic that is your passion. (To learn more about the Watson you can visit the website here .) The fellowship is highly competitive. Though I made it through the first round at my college, at the interview stage I was stopped short and was not sent on to the national interview stage. I was very disappointed, but as senior year kept plowing ahead, I had to put my dreams on the back burner to finish my thesis and graduate. Since then, I have managed to plan about six months of travel post-college and am currently about to take off!

Even so, the travel that I am about to embark on is all about undirected exploration: there is no goal other than what the experience of traveling brings me. I think that this will be deeply satisfying, but I still dream about completing the proposal that I laid out for the Watson. My Watson vision was a year of focused learning on the topic of prisons and incarceration, which, as many of you know, I have developed an obsessive passion for over the past four years.

I hope that you will all take the time to read my Personal Essay and Project Proposal—these are the two essays that I submitted to propose my Watson project. I put a lot of time and energy into the two essays and they are what really capture what my project is and why I want to do it. Please visit my website below for more information and to read!

http://marleesworldincarcerationexploration.weebly.com/