Seniors display CC’s “diversity of opportunity”

Pictured from left are: Joel Scata’06, Lauren Burke ’06 and Pramod Nathan ’06.

Lauren Burke ’06 spent last summer harvesting Chinese beans. She worked the harvest with her host family in Namu Village in rural China, where she was teaching a math class in Chinese to third-grade students.

Pramod Nathan ’06 is writing his honors thesis on the evolutionary morphology of artificial life and designing self-programming robots.

Joel Scata ’06 is investigating the future of United States energy security and potential threats to it, focusing on U.S. oil dependency and fuel-efficient transport.

“Connecticut College creates exceptional people,” said Burke, who along with Nathan and Scata, spoke to a packed auditorium of prospective members of the Class of 2010 at the College’s annual fall open house on Oct 10. The event provided an opportunity for prospective students to explore the campus and its extended community, and hear personal experiences from students like Burke, Nathan, and Scata.

Burke, an admissions fellow with a major in Chinese language and literature, and a self-designed second major in sociocultural dimensions of international relations, has been captain of the women’s rugby team, directed a play the first semester of her freshman year, organized the College’s first-ever and now annual Chinese New Year celebration, and interned with Eve Ensler, creator of the play “The Vagina Monologues,” in New York City.

“Connecticut College is a place for dreamers, for idealists, and for those who are always on the move,” said Burke, who is now applying for a Fulbright Fellowship and applying to law school.

For Nathan, CC is a 22-hour plane ride from his home in Bombay, India. He spent a semester of his junior year studying abroad in Sweden, in minus 30-degree weather an hour and a half from the Arctic Circle. At Connecticut College, he is a double major in computer science and a self-designed Artificial Intelligence/Robotics major.

Nathan has received four funded internships and has traveled to Spain for a research conference. He is now applying to graduate school to study artificial intelligence.

Scata, a government major and economics minor, has been a member of the men’s rowing team, and this year joined the men’s rugby club. Last March, he traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam with 13 students and a professor, visiting Cambodia and drinking cobra’s blood with native tribes in the Northern Mountain regions of the country. He is participating in the Goodwin-Niering Center for Conservation Biology and Environmental Studies Certificate Program, and was granted a funded internship to work for the Atlantic Council of the United States.

— Ursula Bailey ’07