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Lankan Sulo wins Watson
Fellowship
 Lankan born Sulochana
Dissanayake currently studying at the Bates College, Lewiston,
Maine, USA, has won the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Foundation
fellowship.
She is among 40 college seniors with “unusual promise” who have
been honoured with the fellowship for a year of independent
exploration and travel outside the United States.
As the forty-first class of Watson Fellows, they’ll traverse
seventy-eight countries, exploring topics from the poetry of
Arab women, to endangered religions, to wolf/human interaction,
to green entrepreneurship, to wildlife tracking.
The forty TJW fellows come from twenty-one states and three
foreign countries and exhibit a broad diversity of academic
specialty, socio-economic background, and life experience. As
the forty-first class of Watson Fellows, they’ll traverse
seventy-eight countries, exploring topics from the poetry of
Arab women, to endangered religions, to wolf/human interaction,
to green entrepreneurship, to wildlife tracking.
Sulo is the only Sri Lankan to win the Watson fellowship in
recent years apart from being one of the three from outside the
US.
An alum of St. Bridget’s Convent, class of 2005, Sulo was
accepted to Bates College (Lewiston, Maine, USA) with a 92%
scholarship in 2005. She was selected a Dana Scholar ‘05/’06 (an
honour bestowed upon 20 freshmen nominated by professors and
fellow students for outstanding overall achievement) and one of
the 2 Juniors awarded an ‘Arata Scholarship’ ‘07/’08 (awarded
for ‘exemplifying the qualities of honesty, clean living,
unselfishness and consideration toward others without regard to
scholarship or athletics.’) She was one of the rare cases where
the Robinson Players (only student theater group on campus)
allowed a freshman to direct in her first semester – and chose
to direct Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Anniversary’ as her first
production at Bates. She was elected president of the Robinson
Players in her junior year. Supported by a theater department
that deeply values their students as the strength of their
program and uniquely caters to each student’s academic and
professional goals, she directed/acted steadily throughout her
Bates career.
She relentlessly pursued every opportunity to study and practice
the art of theater in and out of Bates. She combined work
experience in professional theaters along with her college
training in an attempt fully realize her talents– in the summer
of 2007, she was selected as an Apprentice for the Williamstown
Theater Festival - one of the most competitive summer stock
theater programs in the United States. She was awarded two
competitive Bates grants (the Hoffman Fellowship and Hoffman
research Grant) to finance this apprenticeship.
As a culmination of her directing experience in and out of
Bates, the Bates Theater Department offered her to direct their
fall main stage production in 2008 (‘A lie of the mind’ by Sam
Shepard), to fulfill the requirements of her directing thesis –
a production usually directed by faculty and has not been
offered to a student for the last 15 years.
Outside of theater, Sulochana was involved in multiple areas of
student life. She was one of the 3 sophomores selected to
fulfill the position of a Junior Advisor (a mentoring position
who is a resource for approximately 10 freshmen), a position
previously open only to Juniors. Since then, she has been
selected as a Resident Coordinator (a mentor and resource for
upper class students) two years in a row and has been working
closely with the Deans of the college to ensure quality living
standards and foster community at Bates.
She chose a unique combination for her double major - partnering
Theater (with a concentration in Directing) with Economics (with
a focus in Social Economics). She is currently writing her
economics thesis on the effectiveness of a cash conditional
grant provided for children of convicted prisoners in Welikada
Prisons, by ‘Friends of Prisoners Children’ (a local NGO headed
by Reverend Sister Immacualte DeAlwis).
Sulochana hopes to teach theater in Sri Lanka and provide
training to artists who wish to professionally pursue the arts.
She conducted a series of workshops in Acting and Playwriting on
her most recent visit to Sri Lanka in December 2008. She hopes
to establish her own theater company that will combine rich
traditional performance cultures with contemporary arts to
realize a movement of local theater that functions as an active
voice of the community in Sri Lanka.
Watson Fellows, in addition to their academic achievements, have
been leaders on- and off- campus. They include municipal and NGO
board members, first responders and EMTs, radio producers and
filmmakers, varsity team captains, entrepreneurs, environmental
educators, and community volunteers. Their accomplishments
include: founding/producing the Darfur Radio Project, winning
the New York Songwriters Circle Competition, coordinating the
300-ambulance evacuation (Hurricane Ike) of Gulf-Coast
hospitals, and lobbying for successful anti-human-trafficking
legislation.
A time-lapse photographer will study rare cloud formations in
high latitudes. A student, who collected cans/bottles as a child
to support her family, will study informal waste collection
systems, and an astrophysicist will take telescopes into the
field to search out varied cultural perspectives on Cosmology. A
War News Radio veteran will explore how radio promotes peace and
reconciliation in post-conflict societies, and a promising
filmmaker will explore the competitive Rubik’s Cube subculture
of “speedcubing.”
As interesting as the projects are, “The awards are long-term
investments in people, not research,” says Cleveland Johnson,
Director of the Watson Fellowship Program and a former Watson
Fellow. “We look for persons likely to lead or innovate in the
future and give them extraordinary independence to pursue their
interests outside of traditional academic structures. Watson
Fellows are passionate learners, creative thinkers, and
motivated self-starters who are encouraged to dream big but
demonstrate feasible strategies for achieving their fellowship
goals. The Watson Fellowship affords an unequalled opportunity
for global experiential learning.”
Our awardees come from select private liberal arts colleges and
universities. This year, 177 finalists competed on the national
level, after their institutions nominated them in the autumn.
Each fellow will receive $28,000 for the year of travel and
exploration.
The Thomas J. Watson Fellowship Program was established in 1968
by the children of Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the founder of
International Business Machines Corp., and his wife, Jeannette
K. Watson, to honor their parents’ long-standing interest in
education and world affairs. The Watson Foundation regards its
investment in people as an effective contribution to the global
community.
In the history of the program, approximately 2600 Watson Fellows
have taken this challenging journey. The Watson Year provides
fellows an opportunity to test their aspirations and abilities
and develop a more informed sense of international concern.
Fellows have gone on to become college presidents and
professors, CEOs of major corporations, MacArthur “genius” grant
recipients, politicians, artists, lawyers, diplomats, doctors,
journalists, innovators and researchers across a wide range of
sciences and engineering disciplines.
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