Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

ISU poli-sci major receives prestigious NSF fellowship

Petra Hendrickson, Indiana State University senior majoring in political science:

she felt disbelief and shock, but also performed a happy dance when she found out that she was selected to receive the fellowship, which will pay $10,500 a year for three years of tuition costs and $30,000 a year for three years to allow her to pursue independent research.
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“I had stopped checking the Web site,” she said. “I thought ‘I’m not going to get this.’ Then a friend posted on my Facebook wall congratulations.” Nine political science students were selected for the fellowship, and Hendrickson said she saw her name and Indiana State next to students from University of California at Berkeley, Yale and the College of William and Mary.

Michael Chambers, political science department chair, was one of the professors who encouraged Hendrickson to apply for the fellowship. “This is the first time that an ISU political science student has ever been awarded such a prestigious and competitive fellowship for graduate study,” he said. “This award is a testament to her academic efforts over the past four years.”

Those efforts have included research into ethnic conflict and genocide and presentations of her findings at undergraduate research conferences and political science associations’ regional conferences.
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Hendrickson, who chose to attend ISU after participating in the university’s Summer Honors program for talented high school students, said originally she wanted to be a diplomat, so she decided to study political science. That plan changed slightly soon after she began studying at ISU. “One of the professors took me under her wing,” she said. “Then graduate school is all that I could imagine doing.”
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In the political science department, Hendrickson said she received research opportunities from professors through encouragement to work as a research assistant and to take part in the National Science Foundation-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates. “I had eight weeks to develop my own research project and conduct it from start to finish,” she said. She presented her research into “U.S. Rhetorical Response to Genocide in the Media” at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research.
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After she presented those findings at the Midwest Political Science Association’s annual conference, she submitted her research to Pi Sigma Alpha, where it was selected as a national runner-up for best undergraduate class paper. Hendrickson plans to begin work on her doctoral degree in political science at Michigan State University in the fall, with an ultimate goal of becoming a political science professor. On her way to that, she hopes to do field research into the ethnic conflicts and genocide.