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Thirty-two exceptional MIT students selected as 2023 Burchard Scholars

Undergraduates selected for the competitive program enjoy a seminar series and conversations over dinners with distinguished faculty.
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MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
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A view of the MIT campus. A sculpture of a human figure comprised of numbers and symbols is in the foreground.
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A high percentage of the MIT students who receive Rhodes, Marshall, and other distinguished scholarships and fellowships are former Burchard Scholars.
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Photo: Gretchen Ertl

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (MIT SHASS) is pleased to announce that 32 MIT undergraduate sophomores and juniors have been named as the 2023 Burchard Scholars.

Elected by the Burchard Committee from a large pool of impressive applicants, all students chosen for the program have demonstrated excellence and engagement in the humanistic fields, but can be majoring in science, design, and engineering fields as well as in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.  

In the course of this calendar year, the Burchard Scholars will attend seminar dinners with members of the SHASS faculty, during which they will have the chance to engage with the faculty and with one another. The program is designed to broaden horizons for promising students, as well as to provide scholars the chance to engage in friendly but challenging discussions in which to hone skills for expressing, critiquing, and debating ideas with peers and mentors. During the course of the calendar year, the scholars also attend several cultural events in the Boston metropolitan area.

The key features of these dinners are the presentations by SHASS’s faculty, on topics ranging from nuclear security to an economic view of artificial intelligence to cross-cultural histories in centuries-old manuscripts. Drawing on the school’s vast and varied fields of expertise, the seminars offer near-endless avenues of exploration for ambitious scholars.

It is perhaps no surprise that a high percentage of the MIT students who receive Rhodes, Marshall, and other major scholarships and fellowships are former Burchard Scholars. “These students are an extraordinary group of MIT undergraduates," says Margery Resnick, associate professor of literature and director of the Burchard program. “They are thoughtful, smart, and enthusiastic about the opportunity to discuss a wide range of ideas with faculty and fellow students.”

The 2023 Burchard Scholars are:

Jennifer Ai 
Antti Eero Asikainen 
Elizabeth Athaide 
Stephen Alexander Brennan 
Matthew Caren 
Anushree Chaudhuri 
Diana Degnan 
Diego Delarue 
Katherine Ellison 
Iana Ferguson 
Ishan Ganguly 
Willow Huang 
Selena Liu 
Rachel Loh 
Benjamin Lou 
Joy Ma 
Grace McMillan 
Raj Mehta 
Emmi Mills 
Laker Newhouse 
Katherine Reisig 
Ananda Santos Figueiredo 
Teddy Schoenfeld 
Alexis Spinetta 
Olivia Steger
Pedro Suarez 
Amber Velez 
Daisy Wang 
Felicia Xiao 
Cindy Xie 
Yi Jun Yang 
Alexis Zitzmann 

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