Wednesday, January 7, 2015 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, January 7, 2015 // The Statement 
5B

Since he graduated from the Uni-

versity of Michigan in May 2014, Louis 
Mirante has hitchhiked via cargo ship 
in the Maldives, attended a class taught 
by the Dalai Lama on Tibetan Buddhism 
and spent a month living in Chile.

Before Easter, the LSA graduate plans 

to live in Southern India for a month or 
more before he heads to Northern India 
and, most likely, to Nepal to live and 
teach at a monastery.

Mirante is traveling the world, but not 

on his own dime: he is a part of the inau-
gural class of the LSA Bonderman Trav-
el Fellowship, and was given $20,000 
to travel the world for eight months or 
more.

Piloted with the class of 2014, the LSA 

Bonderman Travel Fellowship grants 
four LSA graduates each year the chance 
to travel the world. They can go wher-
ever they want, when they want for eight 
months or more.

The only restrictions?
Fellows must travel independently 

and can only be with friends or family 
from home or a travel group for up to 10 
days. They must go to at least two regions 
of the world and six countries, and are 
discouraged from traveling to western-
ized countries, including Australia, New 
Zealand, Canada and nations in West-
ern Europe.

2014 LSA graduates Tyler Mesman, 

Erin Busbee, Ashline Hermiz and Louis 
Mirante make up the first class of fel-
lows, selected from a pool of about 100 
applicants in the spring of 2014.

Since leaving the U.S. on or by Aug. 

31, collectively, they have traveled to 
Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, 
Bolivia, Croatia, Hungary, Jordan, Tur-
key, Cyprus, Zimbabwe, South Africa, 
India, Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore, 
Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Malaysia.

The program is the brainchild of 

David Bonderman, an investment advis-
er and businessman who graduated in 
1963 from the University of Washing-
ton, which has hosted a similar program 
for about two decades.

After 
graduating 
from 
Harvard 

University’s law school, Bonderman 
received a Sheldon Fellowship, which 
gave him the opportunity to travel the 
globe. The experience had such a pro-
found impact on his life that he was 

inspired to start the Bonderman Travel 
Fellowship at the University of Wash-
ington in 1995. Today, Washington’s 
Bonderman fellowship is awarded to 
seven undergraduates and seven gradu-
ate students each year.

Bonderman’s daughter and her hus-

band are both University graduates, and 
it was their idea to start the fellowship in 
Bonderman’s name. Plans for the pilot 
program began in September 2013, and 
the first class of fellows was notified in 
April 2014.

Mesman, who is from Grand Rapids, 

began his travels in Istanbul on Aug. 25 
and has since gone to Turkey, Cyprus, 
Zimbabwe, South Africa and, for the 
past month, India. He originally planned 
on going to Israel as well, but had to 
change his plans after it was placed on 
the University travel restriction list.

Which brings up another program 

rule: fellows cannot visit anywhere that 
is restricted according to the Universi-
ty’s Travel Warning and Travel Restric-
tion Destinations. When they applied to 
the program, all applicants submitted 
a sample itinerary, and must work with 
Rachel Reuter, the University’s Center 
for Global and Intercultural Study’s 
Health & Safety Coordinator, to ensure 
their final itinerary is realistic and 
doable.

In recent years, two Washington 

Bonderman fellows have died abroad 
— Jennifer Caldwell traveled with the 
Fellowship in 2007 and died in a 2009 
car accident in South Africa, and Alena 
Suazo was travelling with the fellow-
ship in Guatemala when became ill and 
died in 2011. Jordan said they encour-
age fellows to extensively research any 
place they plan to travel to, and fellows 
must e-mail the CGIS office every other 
week with updates on their whereabouts. 
Additionally, if fellows want to make 
changes to their approved itinerary after 
the program begins, these changes must 
be approved by CGIS.

“It’s a hands off program,” Reuter 

said. “But we’re certainly there if they 
need it.”

After India, Mesman plans on going 

to Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet-
nam. He also wants to try to go to Burma 
and Laos.

“Each country and culture has its 

own surprises that come along with it 
and eventually you kind of learn to go 
with the flow,” Mesman wrote in an 
e-mail — Internet where he was staying 
in India was not strong enough to sup-
port a video call. “I have actually been 
more surprised by how similar people 
are rather than the differences. I’ve been 
surprised by the culture shocks between 
each country though — going from Tur-
key to Zimbabwe is quite the physical 
and cultural leap. I don’t have the oppor-
tunity to go back to the U.S. and push the 
‘cultural reset button’.”

In addition to the basic stipulations, 

Bonderman fellows budget their travels 
themselves. They are given $8,000 up 
front, and starting one month after they 
leave the United States, they are given 
$1,500 a month. Within their budget, 
they must purchase University travel 
insurance.

Reuter said managing a budget is part 

of what makes the program a great learn-
ing experience. $20,000 may seem like a 
lot, but over eight months expenses can 
add up fast.

“Seeking out things that they wouldn’t 

typically do if they had more money is 
part of the experience,” Reuter said.

Hermiz said she was initially very 

careful about budgeting her money, but 
has found that travel is cheaper than she 
expected.

“In the beginning I thought $1,000 

per country would be appropriate,” she 
wrote in an e-mail.

Hermiz has been to Turkey, Croatia, 

Hungary, Jordan, Cambodia and Malay-
sia.

“I have found that I spend much less 

than that and I really pay attention to 
ways of saving money as well as when it 
is OK to splurge,” she said.

During the first application cycle 

for the program, around 100 seniors 
applied. A selection committee consist-
ing of CGIS staff and faculty reviewed 
18 finalists, and nine candidates were 
interviewed. CGIS director Michael 
Jordan said they hope to expand the pro-
gram gradually in the future, although 
Bonderman’s daughter and her husband 
plan to keep it as an undergraduate LSA 
program.

Jordan said they look for students 

who haven’t had significant internation-

al travel or study abroad experiences, 
who are open to new experiences and 
the kind of people who would make good 
connections and reflect on their experi-
ences.

Before the fellowship, Mesman had 

only been outside of the United States 
once: to Spain in 2010 on an organized 
high school trip. He described this expe-
rience as “insulated” because he stayed 
with a group the entire time and didn’t 
interact with locals or plan his own trav-
els.

“Even though I’m traveling indepen-

dently I am never truly alone,” he said. 
“(There are) always new people to meet 
in hostels and around.”

Mesman said the hardest part of 

the experience, for him, has been the 
“impermanence” of relationships with 
the people he’s met while traveling.

“These relationships are temporary. 

At some point either they or I have to 
say goodbye and keep traveling,” he 
said. “Wash, Rinse, Repeat. I’m really a 
people person and I like having a sense 
of community — so I miss the way it felt 
to walk around campus and just run into 
people that you already know instead of 
just walking around as another face in 
the crowd.”

Mesman doesn’t currently have a plan 

to return home. After the eight months 
of the fellowship ends, he hopes to travel 
for as long as possible. He is also making 
plans to travel with his mother after the 
fellowship to wherever she chooses.

Like Mesman, Erin Busbee, who 

majored in anthropology, rarely traveled 
outside of the United States before the 
fellowship. A varsity track athlete at the 
University, she spent so much time prac-
ticing and competing that she wasn’t able 
to study abroad either.

Busbee has been in South America for 

almost five months, but she nearly didn’t 
apply for the fellowship in the first place. 
Two of her friends sent her information 
about the program months in advance, 
but she glossed it over while applying to 
policy fellowships in the United States.

She always dreamed of traveling but 

never thought something like the Bond-
erman fellowship would become a real-
ity.

“It kind of came naturally,” she said. 

“Traveling is something I’ve always 

wanted to do.”

Busbee said her experiences so far 

have been greatly enriched by the people 
she’s met in Santiago, Chile; Mendoza, 
Argentina; Cordoba, Argentina; Buenos 
Aires, Argentina; Montevideo, Uruguay; 
Salvador, Bahia in Brazil; and Rio de 
Janeiro, Brazil.

“Most of my experience has been 

made by the people that I’ve met,” she 
said. “Going to so many places is nice. 
I’ve enjoyed experience different places, 
but after a certain point, being in Chile, 
Uruguay, Argentina, everything begins 
to look the same to me and the languages 
are similar. The people I’ve met and the 
things I’ve done have stood out.”

Once Busbee leaves South America, 

she will travel to South Africa and then 
the Phillipines and Thailand. She also 
hopes to add another country — if her 
visa allows her to, she would like to go to 
Mozambique after South Africa. If not, 
she might try to go to Japan.

Busbee said, the fellowship has 

opened her mind to a host of opportu-
nities she had never thought she would 
experience before. It has been a learning 
experience in every sense of the word.

“I’m thinking about things like living 

abroad for a few years whereas I always 
shied away from this sort of thing before,” 
Busbee said. “I’m definitely more open 
to not being in the United States and not 
quite having an exact career path. I can’t 
imagine being back and going to work 
every day.”

Louis Mirante also said the fellow-

ship, for him, has been about meeting 
and learning from the groups of people 
he has met. He had previously traveled 
in Europe and Mexico, but never to Asia 
or South America, and said that going to 
countries that aren’t dominated by the 
European way of thinking was one of the 
best experiences he had.

“You learn new ways of thinking,” he 

said. “Internalizing these new ways of 
thinking can help you learn about prob-
lems in new ways and think about solu-
tions to things you might not even have 
considered to be problems.”

At the time of his interview, Mirante 

was in the Maldives, a small island 
nation off the coast of Sri Lanka that 
wasn’t originally on his itinerary. He 
decided to travel here after finding cheap 

round trip tickets for a four-day trip — 
but stayed for a month.

Mirante was in the Maldives when he 

found himself in the middle of a water 
crisis. After a fire at the country’s main 
water plant, the entire northern part 
of the country had no running water. 
Mirante was in the Maldives the entire 
time, and he saw how they responded to 
the crisis, rationing out water from pub-
lic buildings and eventually, Sri Lanka 
and India.

“The way that they distributed it was 

from their main cultural centers, which 
are the mosques,” he said. “I stood in line 
for water at mosques with everyone else 
so I could have something to drink. That 
was definitely a really interesting expe-
rience.”

Mirante said he realized how much 

more he engages with a place when he 
does not set himself a date on when he is 
leaving.

“When you have an expiration date 

for an experience or a place, it really lim-
its how you think about traveling there,” 
Mirante said. “I really go with the flow. If 
I feel like its time for me to leave a place, 
I leave. If I feel like I should stay longer, 
I stay longer.”

Before the Fellowship began, Her-

miz’s only international travel was to 
France with her high school French 
class. She said the most surprising thing 
was how prevalent Western culture is 
internationally.

“In some places I was not expecting to 

see Starbucks or KFCs everywhere,” she 
said. “And it is not something that really 
surprised me, but it saddens me to see 
so many products that encourage skin 
whitening and to hear many young Cam-
bodian girls state that they do not like 
their skin because it is darker. I know 
how pervasive the white beauty stan-
dard is, but it is really crushing to see just 
how ingrained it is and how normative it 
is in both western and non-western cul-
tures.”

Though study abroad programs at 

the University can be expensive, the 
Bonderman Fellowship is free for all 
applicants. Mesman transferred to the 
University from a community college 
and only spent three years on campus. 
He always dreamed of traveling, but 
didn’t study abroad for financial reasons 

and to make the most of his time in Ann 
Arbor. When he discovered the Fellow-
ship, he said it was “too good to be true” 
and dropped all of his job applications at 
the time so he could focus on applying.

“I knew I would regret it for the rest of 

my life if I didn’t at least apply,” he said. 
“And now here I am.”

Mesman studied political science and 

philosophy at the University. He origi-
nally planned on going into domestic 
U.S. politics, but after traveling since 
August, his plans have changed.

“I’ve been looking into careers that 

are more internationally focused so I 
can combine my passion for travel with 
my work,” he wrote in an e-mail. “(I’m) 
not exactly sure what that looks like 
for me yet but I’ll begin exploring more 
options once I get back to the U.S.”

All four fellows agreed that the fel-

lowship has been a life changing experi-
ence, but in different ways. Hermiz said 
she has grown immensely because of her 
travels. She plans on going into Social 
Work, but said her experiences have 
helped her understand that internation-
al issues are just as important as social 
inequality in the U.S.

“I feel so much more independent now 

than I did before I left,” she said. “I take 
more risks and I am much more outgoing 
and patient. I am also constantly able to 
reflect on my experiences, but also ana-
lyze social issues in broader context.”

Mesman said the impacts of the Fel-

lowship on his life have forever changed 
him.

“I don’t think I’ll fully understand 

how it’s changed my life until it’s over 
and even some months beyond that,” 
Mesman said. “But right now I can say 
that I feel like the Fellowship has made 
me a more authentic me and tapped into 
my passion for exploration and learning. 
It’s simultaneously made me more confi-
dent and more humble about my under-
standing of the world and my place in 
it. It’s definitely shifted my perspective. 
There truly is nothing else like it.”

The 2015 application is open to any-

one who will have graduated between 
December 2014 and May 2015. The 
application requires a trip itinerary, 
three essays and two recommendations. 
Recipients will be notified by mid-Feb-
ruary.

T h e B o n d e r m a n F e l l o w s h i p :
E i g h t m o n t h s , $ 2 0 , 0 0 0 t o s e e t h e w o r l d

PHOTO COURTESY OF TYLER MESMAN

By Carolyn Gearig, Special Projects Manager