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Harvard juniors Eva C. Frazier ’26 and Ashley C. Adirika ’26 were awarded the Truman Scholarship — a $30,000 award gifted to college students who exemplify the “future of public service leadership” — according to a press release issued on Friday.
The scholarship, afforded to college juniors, provides funding to individuals who will “work in public service for three of the seven years following completion of a Foundation-funded graduate degree program as a condition of receiving funding,” according to the Harvard Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships website. The Truman Foundation gave out its first scholarships in the 1977-78 academic year and aims to honor 60 undergraduates annually.
“I got an email from President Garber that notified me that I was selected to be a Truman Scholar, and I was shocked,” Adirika said. “I immediately sent a text in the family group chat, and my siblings started calling me.”
Adirika, a Pforzheimer House resident who studies government and has served as co-president of the Harvard Undergraduate Association, plans to pursue a JD-MPP and eventually work in criminal justice.
“What I am really focused on is working to combat the criminalization of poverty,” she said. “I hope to do that first by being on-the-ground as a litigator, working to defend vulnerable populations, and then translating that experience into doing litigation.”
Frazier, a social studies concentrator in Lowell House, plans to “pursue law and public health degrees in order to advocate for health justice in rural communities.”
She attributes her dedication to public service to her small-town upbringing in Hinesburg, Vermont — a community where she witnessed firsthand the opioid crisis and rural economic devastation.
Frazier has been involved in pro-Palestinian activism on campus and said she hopes to provide “a voice to people that are often shut out from the national conversation.”
“I’ve gotten to the place that I have because of the communities I’m a part of at Harvard and at home, and I want to continue to serve those communities — whether that be my small town of Vermont or the students I’ve organized alongside with — even in the face of continuing escalating repression,” Frazier said.
“Rural communities are often, I think, weaponized in the name of national security or policies that we see to be exclusionary or harm communities abroad,” Frazier added.
“Part of my goal in pursuing public service is to connect the ways in which both rural communities in the US and international areas of the globe have been, I think, neglected and harmed by mainstream US policy.”
Adirika said she was “incredibly grateful” to receive the award and “hopeful” about the work she and other Truman scholars will pursue.
“I just feel so optimistic and hopeful about the things that we’ll be able to accomplish in this world. I think all of us all want to do good, and to be able to see that at a time like this just brings me so much hope,” Adirika added.
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