Alex Lewton ’27, a double major in Italian and government, last month was awarded a U.S. Department of State Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship.
The first member of his immediate family to study abroad, Lewton is spending the winter term in Rome, immersing himself in the Italian language and culture.
Approximately 1,600 scholarships have been handed out to students from the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, according to a State Department news release (PDF).
The State Department program, named for the late Republican congressman from New York who chaired the House Committee on International Relations, provides up to $5,000 for federal Pell Grant recipients to study abroad.
Lewton learned about the scholarship by browsing the Dartmouth Fellowship Advising website. “I’m super excited to have the scholarship,” he says.
From Kensington, Md., a suburb of Washington, Lewton began studying Italian in high school. “I really just fell in love with the culture and the language,” he says.
To be plunged into an environment in which centuries of history are layered on top of one another, “is a bit of a culture shock. But it’s amazing,” Lewton observes.
Even in the brief period he’s been in Rome, Lewton says, it’s clear that American and Italian politics, and points of intersection and difference, are a perennial subject. An upcoming assignment is to go out onto the streets of Rome to interview Italians on a topic of the student’s choosing.
While he can’t yet predict in which direction his studies in Italian and government will take him, he hopes he can find a way to combine both fields, whether in international relations, law, or business.
Although he has studied Italian intensively for six years, and is a drill instructor for Dartmouth’s Department of French and Italian, Lewton is still reminded of how much you have to absorb to be truly fluent in another language.
“Every time I think I’m pretty comfortable with the language and good with the pronunciation, there’s always a new scenario where there’s new vocabulary, and there’s new things to learn,” he says.
Lewton is an “extremely committed and bright student and I am confident that his intellectual generosity will benefit the entire group of people with whom he will be sharing this study abroad experience,” says Matteo Gilebbi, a senior lecturer in the Department of French and Italian and part of the affiliated faculty in the Comparative Literature Program.
“It’s great to get out of campus and try to see more of the world, because I might never have the opportunity to spend three months in another country just dedicated to observing and learning and listening, and taking everything in like this. So it’s really something to cherish and make the most of, if you can,” Lewton says.
More information on Gilman and other fellowship opportunities is available through Fellowship Advising.
