EE undergraduate student Kaiwen Sun has recently been awarded the 2013 Bonderman Travel Fellowship. Kaiwen is one of fourteen UW students selected to receive this fellowship, which will allow each fellow to travel to a minimum of two regions and six countries around the world over the span of at least eight months.
The Bonderman Fellowships provide $20,000 to each awardee and the unique, once in a lifetime experience to learn about new cultures, people and areas of the world. Students may not engage in academic study or conduct research while traveling.
Kaiwen is a UW Honors Program Student dual-majoring in EE and Philosophy. Through his travels, he intends to gain an understanding for new and radically different cultural ideologies. Kaiwen will travel to Russia, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Bhutan, India, Kenya and South Africa. He is fascinated by the way cultural values and world outlooks differ so much among different societies, and how difficult it is to reflect on them since they are so deeply ingrained. He is particularly interested in the way different cultural ideologies affect the beliefs, values, and interactions between people of those cultures, and what the differences tell us about how people can perceive life differently.