"Where would you go if you had eight months to travel solo?” ChemE graduate student Cori Bucherl's answer to this question earned her a prestigious Bonderman Fellowship, and she now prepares to embark on 8 months of travel through South America and Asia.
You can go to Cori's blog to follow her across the continents and see her incredible pictures.
Before setting off, Cori contributed to the ChemE newsletter as a guest writer, describing the places and passions comprising her adventure. We look forward to an update when she returns!
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I applied to UW’s graduate school to research renewable energy. As I progressed through the first couple years, I slowly accepted that a research career would not be my main contribution to saving the world. A Master’s degree in ChemE is my academic end point and I intend to use it to pursue sustainable engineering. However, simply living in Seattle (after 22 years in Indiana) opened a world of experience about which I am incredibly excited.
I learned that I am passionate about being in the mountains, about music and dance, and about exploring the intricacies of human interaction. When I received an email about the Bonderman Fellowship, it struck me as the perfect opportunity to challenge and cultivate these newfound passions. In short, this fellowship funds 8 months of solo travel with the exclusive purposes of exploration and self-discovery. It’s an unbelievable and amazing gift made possible by University of Washington alum, David Bonderman. I am absolutely delighted and honored (and nervous) to be a recipient.
The Bonderman application process is extremely open-ended, so the travel plan is of my own devising. On December 29, 2013, I board a one-way flight to Peru, where I’ll spend a month before moving on to Chile and Argentina for three more months. In May 2014, I fly to Thailand, my first opportunity for exploration in Asia. I will visit Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia during the remainder of my 8 months as a Bonderman Fellow. I plan to spend a lot of time near to and in the mountains. I want to learn firsthand about music, language, food and dance. I can’t wait to experience the people, culture and history of places so entirely outside my realm of experience. In these situations, I’m so excited to study my own mind and how I interact with myself and with those around me. Overall, I expect that I will be surprised and that I will leave this journey with an entirely new perception of the world and our shared humanity.
After my incredible tenure as a Fellow, I will travel until I feel like returning to the US or until my own travel budget dwindles. I would love to live in Seattle (or the Pacific Northwest) and work in the sustainability sector as an engineer and educator. The end of 2014 is still a long time and a million unexpected experiences away, so we’ll see what happens!