From physics to engineering to music, Soros Fellows excel

Luis Garcia '00 came to the United States with his family when he was seven years old. He knew little about the vast differences between his native Guatemala and the land he would soon call home, only that after a very long trip, he had arrived in a new place.

Now Garcia will be attending graduate school in mechanical engineering at half the cost, thanks to his Guatemalan heritage and a career of achievement in engineering, math and science.

Garcia and Tamar Friedmann GS, a second-year graduate student in the physics department, were each selected to receive prestigious Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.

Thirty Soros Fellowships — which provide a maintenance grant of $20,000 and one-half of the tuition cost of graduate study at any institution of higher education in the United States for two years — are awarded each year to immigrants or children of immigrants to the United States, according to a statement issued by director of the Soros Fellowships Warren F. Ilchman.

Garcia said his Guatemalan background helps him to consider more seriously the needs of poorer societies — such as the need for less-expensive consumer goods — when conducting his research in micro-scale thermal management. In conjunction with the Princeton Materials Institute, Garcia aims in his senior thesis research to discover better materials to dissipate heat in microprocessors, thereby allowing for faster microprocessor technology.

"[Guatemala is] a Third World country," Garcia said. "The middle class in Guatemala is basically like the middle class here," he added, but explained that a very small portion of the population controls a large portion of the country's wealth. "The difference between the middle class and the poor is so much greater there than [in the United States]. It's just more visible to you in Guatemala."

Garcia said he goes back to his native country "every couple of years or so" and has spent the last two summers working in industry, including a summer conducting engineering analysis at the 1.5-square-mile General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich.

Culture

Some of the most direct contact Garcia has had with his culture has been in — of all places — the kitchen of his eating club, Campus.

"For a while I worked in Campus serving meals," Garcia said. "The majority of the kitchen staffs here are Latin American, and so I got to meet a lot of Guatemalans."

He said that working in the Campus Club kitchen gave him a unique opportunity to interact with Princeton's Latin American community.

"They're just really curious about what I remember from Guatemala. They're all pretty recent immigrants, I'd say five years max," he said. "It was nice because they knew that I spoke Spanish, and it was great to meet them and hear their stories." He added that it gave him the opportunity to "learn more about Guatemala."

Garcia said he still keeps in touch with some of the Latin American friends he made working at Campus. "I definitely think it was a meaningful experience," he said.

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While Garcia works in the realm of mechanical engineering, Friedmann studies the very different worlds of antimatter asymmetry theory and music.

"My dream for the future is to be a full professor and debut in Carnegie Hall before I'm 35," she said.

Friedmann, who lived in Israel for 13 years before moving to the United States, enrolled at the University as an undergraduate after earning a certificate in violin from the Juilliard School. After graduation, Friedmann — who is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow — applied directly to Princeton's graduate school.

"[The Soros Fellowships] really encourage achievements in more than one field," she said. "I'm doing both science and music, and that makes the fellowship really unique."

With parents who are Holocaust survivors, Friedmann has made it her mission to advocate human rights, especially student rights.

"As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, in fact as a person from a country full of them, I'm very sensitive to human rights, and as a student, I'm also very sensitive to student rights," she said. "I really believe in raising awareness to student rights."

Friedmann said her intimate involvement in both music and science has created a unique balance in her life.

"Almost everyone that I've been in contact with over my life has encouraged me to do both the science and the music," she said. "Each one balances the other."