STORRS, CT — A senior economics major in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut is one of 40 new Marshall Scholars named today by the British government.
Michelle Prairie, a UConn Presidential Scholar from Vernon, Conn., with a perfect 4.0 grade average, will spend the next two years in the United Kingdom studying for two master’s degrees in development economics.
She is the only student at a public institution in New England chosen for a Marshall this year. The other New England winners were four students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, three from Harvard, two from Boston College, and one each from Princeton and Middlebury.
Prairie will study for one year each at the University of Nottingham and at either the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Warwick, or the School of Advanced Study of the University of London.
She plans to become a professor of development economics, focusing her research on income inequality, particularly in Latin America, and on the effects of trade, aid, and government policies on the distribution of wealth. Eventually she hopes to be a policy analyst for the United Nations, the World Bank, or the U.S. government.
Prairie, who was valedictorian of her senior class at Rockville High School, entered UConn four years ago hoping to study international business. In her second semester, she took an economics course and “something just clicked,” she recalls.
President Michael J. Hogan, whose letter of endorsement capped Prairie’s application to the Marshall committee, called her “thoughtful, astute, and very articulate.”
“Few students get as excited about economic theory and analysis as Michelle,” he wrote.
Prairie’s interest in development economics was born on a trip to Brazil with her church group when she was in high school.
She played soccer with 16-year-old Brazilians who had no shoes, she recalls. Riding on a bus from the airport through the outskirts of Sao Paulo, she was shocked by the stacked-up shanties on the mountainsides.
At UConn she found opportunities for study abroad in Sweden, where she observed the welfare state, and, through the campus Christian group, Reformed University Fellowship, in Peru, where she taught English as a volunteer and assisted a fledgling microfinance program.
“This is when I knew for certain that I wanted to become a development economist,” she wrote in her Marshall application. “I had found a way to serve the poor by using my passion for economic theory.”
She interns at the Travelers Insurance Company in the market research division. As a senior, Prairie won the Travelers Insurance Company Scholarship, the top undergraduate award in the Economics Department.
Her mother, Ellen Prairie, works in the One-Card Office at UConn, and her father, Robert Prairie, is a 1981 UConn alumnus in mechanical engineering technology.
“UConn is being recognized. To actually win a Marshall this year is confirmation that we’ve got these fantastic students. It’s very affirming,” says Jill R. Deans, director of the Office of National Scholarships at UConn.
Marshall scholarships are funded by the British government and are extended to “intellectually distinguished young Americans, their country’s future leaders.”
Alumni of the program include Roger Tsien, a 2008 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, and Peter R. Orszag, recently named by President-elect Barack Obama as the incoming director of the Office of Management and Budget.
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