The University announced yesterday third-year College student Joseph Riley has won a Truman Scholarship, which offers students aiming to work in government or public service $30,000 to put toward graduate studies and leadership training.
Riley is a Politics Honors and Mandarin Chinese major. His two primary areas of research are the role of resource dependency, specifically resource competition, between the United States and China, and the roots of an all-volunteer army.
"[The United States is] leaning toward a great gap between those going into the military and those who don't," Riley said. He has researched these topics since his second year.
President Teresa Sullivan notified Riley Tuesday, calling him into her office without sharing the news beforehand. "I was thrilled and surprised," Riley said. "I told [Sullivan] in high school I got called into the principal's office quite a bit" - but not to receive awards, he added.
At the University, Riley is a Jefferson Scholar, an Echols Scholar and a member of the Army ROTC corps. He has spent the past two summers living and studying in China. After graduating, he will have the choice of deferring his eight-year military commitment to attend graduate school or returning to higher education following completion of his military service.
"I'm looking at doing a master's in public policy with an emphasis on foreign policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard or the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton," Riley said.
Riley said he thought being a part of the Politics Honors program was pivotal in his selection as a Truman Scholar.
"I've been very fortunate to have some high degree of professor guidance and interaction," Riley said. "From the time I was a first year, different professors have kind of taken me under their wing and pointed me in the right direction in terms of different research topics I could explore."
-compiled by Krista Pedersen
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