Written by Matt Cossel '17 | May 21, 2018 | SHARE
“Why go to one country when you can go to three?”
That was Paige Hapeman’s thinking when she was choosing a study abroad program.
Hapeman ‘19 received a Gilman Scholarship, with the help of the Office of Fellowship Advising, and she eventually decided on an International Honors Program that has taken her to San Francisco, Uganda, India and finally Brazil.
She is now in the last week of the program in São Paulo, studying social innovation and social entrepreneurship, but she’s already thinking about what she needs to do when she returns to campus.
The Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship is a grant given by the U.S. Department of State to eligible U.S. citizens who receive the Pell Grant with the stated goal of allowing students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad, according to the program’s website. The scholarship includes a service project requirement for when the students return. After brainstorming what her service project could be, Hapeman came to a rather unorthodox solution.
Hapeman plans on conveying the struggles, happiness and positivity of each of the countries that she is visiting through choreographed dance that she can perform, by herself or with others, at her own showcase event and at various other events around campus.
“I often feel like a lot of the ‘developing’ or ‘third world’ countries face a stigma from the United States that says they have less than the U.S. does, which I have found can be almost the opposite at times in terms of the richness and passion that people have about their countries,” she says. “So I want to express that through dance and movement.”
Hapeman said that her involvement in many different dance groups at Lehigh has allowed her to express herself in ways that cannot always be done with words. She wants to be able to do the same with the cultures and experiences that she had while abroad.
While she’s not exactly excited to return home from her semester abroad, Hapeman said she is excited for her senior year when she plans to do a thesis on a topic that surrounds the United Nations.
Hapeman is an international relations major and she hopes to work in international human rights following her graduation.