Colorado College students and recent graduates, representing a variety of disciplines and departments, were widely recognized for their academic excellence in 2014. Among them:

Benjamin Munyao ’14, a Colorado College economics major from Nairobi, Kenya, received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Munyao’s project, titled “A Walk to Manhood: A Look at the Interplay Among the Society, the Youth, and the Elders,” will take him to Ethiopia, New Zealand, Australia, and Ghana as he explores the rituals in these societies that mark the transition from boys to men. Munyao also won a Projects for Peace award as a sophomore.

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Alexander Langstaff ’14 received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship scholarship. Langstaff, a history major, will spend the coming academic year teaching English in Georgia (the country, not the state!). After his Fulbright year, Langstaff plans on pursuing his interest in history and politics through graduate studies.

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Eugene Tan Perk Han ’14 was selected for the Junior Fellows Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he will work with the organization’s Washington, D.C.-based Energy and Climate Change Program. Tan, an environmental science major with a concentration in chemistry from Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia, primarily will be working on Carnegie’s Oil Initiative.

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Jessica Badgeley ’15 was named a Goldwater Scholar, considered by many to be the top scholarship for students pursuing a career in research science. Badgeley, a geology major and math minor from Seattle, Wash., spent much of November and December on a National Science Foundation funded project with a team of scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, using remote sensing techniques with the goal of locating the Blood Falls brine within Taylor Glacier.

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Gautam Webb ’15 received a Goldwater Honorable Mention. A math major from Golden, Colo., Webb conducted research on avalanche polynomials in the abelian sandpile model last summer at the PURE Math Research Experience for Undergraduates in Hilo, Hawaii. He is attending a second REU this summer, at San Diego State University.

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Caroline Beaton ’13, of Cherry Hills Village, Colo., won the prize for the best undergraduate essay pertaining to psychoanalysis in the country by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Her essay, “To the Lighthouse and Oedipal Triangle,” uses Freudian and self-psychological models of the Oedipus complex and erotic degradation to explore the Ramsay family’s psychical impotence and fragmentation in Virginia Woolf’s novel.