When Gilman Alumnus Nicholas Henderson (China, 2016) was a student-athlete at the Franklin and Marshall College, he had been studying Chinese for two and a half years and had just sustained a career-ending concussion, sidelining him from football and Chinese studies. Nicholas had dreams of attending the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and studying Chinese at the highest levels, but now, that dream was in jeopardy.
After dropping the Chinese language and fighting through a semester of depression, and concussion protocol, he bounced back, earning both the PACIE-Asia Institute Global Education Scholarship and the Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship in the process. As a Gilman scholar, Nicholas was awarded the opportunity to increase his Chinese proficiency and watched American foreign policy take shape in Shanghai while studying abroad in the spring of 2016. He found the experience so vital to his language development that he chose to stay in China for the summer and continue improving his language proficiency.
Nicholas’ passion for the Chinese language led him to win the scholarship to participate in Hopkins-Nanjing Center’s 2019-2020 U.S.-China Exchange Scholars Program. Nicholas will be joining his future classmates in Nanjing as a student in the Master of Arts in International Studies program while continuing to study U.S.-China relations with the goal of facilitating healthy cooperation and competition between the two countries.
The Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies (HNC) opened in 1986 as a one-of-a-kind graduate center for international studies in China. For over 30 years, the Hopkins-Nanjing Center has provided bilingual education and training graduates who contribute to Sino-global relations across a variety of fields. The Center offers the U.S.-China Exchange Scholarship to alumni of U.S. government-supported programs for Chinese language study.
Congratulations to Nicholas!
Learn more about the Hopkins-Nanjing Center graduate programs and this scholarship opportunity.