Solis ’07 wins Mitchell prize for social work

Solis, one of the 12 winners of this year’s George J. Mitchell Scholarship, will pursue a master’s degree in international human rights law at the National University of Ireland-Galway. There were 300 applicants this year for the scholarship, which funds one year of graduate study in Ireland.

A Wilson School concentrator, Solis has already tackled human rights issues in two countries. Upon graduating, he went to South Korea on a Henry Luce Scholarship and worked to address discrimination faced by HIV-positive citizens, he said. He added that he also worked with elderly Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves during World War II, when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule.

“They protest every Wednesday outside the Japanese embassy,” Solis said. “They want the government to recognize its past atrocities. They want a direct, formal apology, which they have not gotten, and it has been that way since the 1930s.”

“I thought it was amazing that he was out there demonstrating on the [Korean women’s] behalf,” said politics professor David Abalos, who taught Solis in POL 333: Latino Politics in the United States. “I have been so amazed by his sense of awareness of people from all kinds of backgrounds.”

Abalos noted that Solis was probably one of the best students he ever taught, adding that he “was very impressed with his ability to write and get his ideas across.”

While working in Asia, Solis co-founded the Hmong Action Network, which works to help the Hmong minority in Laos and Thailand. In the long term, however, he wants to focus on human rights issues in Latin America, he said.

While in Korea, he applied to the Princeton in Latin America (PiLA) program, and he now works in Chile as a PiLA fellow. He also works with Human Rights Watch, the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences and the Unified Movement of Sexual Minorities in Chile.

Solis’ interest in public service and in Latin America specifically began with a freshman-year service trip to Mexico to work with impoverished communities, he said.

“As a freshman, the trip opened my eyes,” he said, noting that he “led the trip the next year, which inspired me to go abroad and work, specifically in Latin America.”

Solis noted that Princeton’s motto sums up how he feels about his career.

“It’s the nature of ‘In the nation’s service and in the service of all nations,’ ” he said. “It all started at Princeton.”

Solis’ academic interest in Latin America motivated his senior thesis, which focused on human rights in Argentina and Brazil.

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Wilson School professor Emilie Hafner-Burton, who advised Solis’ thesis and is currently a visiting fellow at Stanford, noted in an e-mail that the Mitchell Scholarship “is a well-deserved honor for Michael, who is not only deeply committed to social justice but possesses the intelligence to make those commitments matter.”

Solis noted that everyday life at Princeton, not just his academic work, inspired him to work in public service. One example he mentioned was an experience he had with a worker in Tower Club, of which he was a member.

“There was a woman working in [Tower] who I taught English to, and now she is working at Whitman College,” Solis said. He noted that the two spoke often. “She helped put a personal face on the problems some people have within the United States.”

Solis’ many successes, however, “never really went to his head,” Abalos said. “He was kind of quiet, actually, but very insightful … He is an outstanding young man with a superb sense of who he is as a person.”