Renehan ’12 Awarded Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Indonesia
Peter Renehan ’12, of Cheshire, Conn., has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Indonesia for next year. A chemistry major with concentrations in both the premed and Environmental Studies programs, Renehan will teach English in a rural high school.
Under the Fulbright grant, Renehan plans to foster in his students an appreciation for the important relationship of the humanities to the sciences that he has discovered as an undergraduate at Holy Cross. As a chemistry major, Renehan made the decision to pursue an honors thesis in English, a move that corresponds to his advocacy for intellectually risky academic and extracurricular pursuits.
“I think it’s really important for people to throw themselves into situations that challenge their conventional, ‘comfortable’ center of focus,” he says.
As a secondary objective, Renehan will explore herbal medicine and the deep-rooted ties between medicine and religion. He plans to attend medical school after his year in Indonesia.
At Holy Cross, Renehan was the 2010-11 Beckman Scholar, which funded two years of his bioinorganic research with Joshua R. Farrell, Thomas E. D’Ambra associate professor of chemistry. The Beckman Science Research Scholarship aims to promote undergraduate involvement in primary research in the biological and chemical sciences, thereby cultivating interest and opportunities for research careers in the sciences.
Renehan also cofounded the Holy Cross First Responders Club, the College’s first recognized student organization for emergency medicine. Currently, he serves as co-chair for both the Hanify-Howland Memorial Lecture Committee and the American Medical Student Association.
Each year approximately 1,000 college students are awarded grants through the Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship program in international educational exchange. Fulbright grants are made to U.S. citizens and nationals of other countries for a variety of educational activities, primarily university lecturing, advanced research, graduate study and teaching in elementary and secondary schools. Since the program’s inception in 1946, more than 300,000 participants — chosen for their leadership potential — have had the opportunity to observe each other’s political, economic and cultural institutions.
Read about this year’s other Holy Cross Fulbright Grant recipients: Joseph Cavanaugh ’12, Mattea Cumoletti ’12, Caroline Galiatsos ’12, Daniel Geiger ’11, Eliza Gettel ’12, Heidi Grek ’12, Maria Jaroszewicz ’12, Jaeyeon Lee ’12, Courtney Lesoon ’12 and George Matthews ’12.
