AUSTIN, Texas—For the second time in two years, The University of Texas at Austin has a winner in both the prestigious Rhodes and British Marshall Scholarship competitions. Both students will study at Oxford University in England.
Sara Galvan, a Plan II Honors Program/architecture/Spanish student, is one of 32 Americans who were awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. Paul Domjan, also a Plan II student, is one of only 40 winners nationwide of a British Marshall Scholarship. Both Galvan and Domjan are seniors.
The Rhodes Scholarship offers two years of study at Oxford University, and the Marshall Scholarship provides for two or three years of study at any institution of higher education in the United Kingdom. The Rhodes Scholarship was created in 1902 by British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes. The Marshall Scholarship was set up by the British as a way of thanking the American people for the Marshall Plan.
Galvan, who is from Houston, will study towards a second bachelor’s degree in anthropology and archeology. Domjan, who is from Austin and is the son of Michael Domjan, the chairman of the UT Austin psychology department, plans to study at Oxford for a masters in philosophy (M.Phil.) in international relations.
Last spring, Domjan spent the semester in Hungary at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences, and interned at the Budapest Centre for Security and Defense Studies Foundation. Last summer, Galvan, participated in a city reconstruction project in Bosnia. She also was the recipient of a $30,000 Truman Scholarship.
“Paul is a gifted young scholar, who studies international relations both on the practical level and from a strong grounding and interest in philosophy,” said Dr. Cynthia Shelmerdine, chairman of the classics department at UT Austin and head of the UT Rhodes/Marshall Selection Committee. “The interplay between theory and the real world is very important to Paul, and shapes his goal of combining a life in academia with a role as government adviser on specific international policy matters. He clearly has a distinguished career ahead of him, and Oxford will be a formative next stop along the road.”
Dr. Richard Lariviere, dean of the UT Austin College of Liberal Arts, said that Galvan’s area of study — Plan II and architecture — is an unusual combination, “but Sara has to an unusual degree the ability to integrate the practical aspects of her study with a humanistic sense of history and society.
“Hence, her Junior Fellows project on the fate of synagogues in Spain, and her insistence on learning Serbo-Croatian when she had the chance to participate in the city reconstruction project in Bosnia,” said Lariviere. “A strong sense of how people, communities and buildings interact lies behind her career goal of becoming an effective advocate for architectural preservation as an essential component of city planning. It also explains her desire to study the historical aspects of urban planning in the anthropology and archeology degree program at Oxford.”
