Jacob Andreas, SEAS ’12, screamed in excitement and jumped for joy when he was offered the Churchill Scholarship over the phone last week.
Andreas is just the second Columbia student to win the prestigious scholarship—and the first since 1963. Every year, the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States gives the scholarship to at least 14 students who excel in science, engineering, or math.
“I really wasn’t expecting to get it at all,” Andreas said. “It’s a great honor.”
The scholarship—which is comparable to the Marshall and Rhodes scholarships—funds a year of study at the University of Cambridge, which costs between $45,000 and $50,000. Andreas plans to pursue a master’s degree in computer science at Cambridge.
“It’s a very prestigious award,” said Nizar Habash, a research scientist at the Columbia Center for Computational Learning Systems. “It reflects very nicely on everybody in the department.”
Andreas, a computer science major who has done research at the Columbia Natural Language Processing Group since his sophomore year at Columbia, is held in high esteem by several faculty members. Habash taught him in a graduate-level class.
“I would compare him to some of our best graduate students,” Habash said. “He was one of two or three people in the class who got an A-plus.”
Andreas also took a 6000-level class with computer science professor Michael Collins.
“He’s a phenomenal student,” Collins said.
Andreas does not plan to take many classes at Cambridge. For the most part, he will work on a single research project.
“Being able to focus on a research project for a whole year without distractions is really exciting,” he said.
Universities are invited to nominate up to two candidates for the Churchill Scholarship each year, and Andreas hopes that other Columbia students will apply for it in the future. He said that the lack of Churchill Scholarship recipients at Columbia is probably a result of students’ not knowing that it exists.
“Until recently, the fellowship office didn’t have their act together. Most places, there’s this pretty serious on-campus competition,” he said. “Nobody else even applied.”
Still, he said, there are many Columbia students who he thinks would have a shot at winning.
“There are a lot of really impressive scientists on this campus,” he said.
Faculty members, too, hope that Andreas’ scholarship will motivate other Columbia undergraduates to apply.
“It’s a model for what other people can do,” computer science professor Kathleen McKeown said. “It lets people know what’s possible.”
Andreas plans to pursue his Ph.D. after earning his master’s degree, and he eventually wants to teach at a university. But in the meantime, he is excited for next year.
“Cambridge is kind of a magical place,” he said. “So much happened there. It was at Cambridge that computer science as a discipline came to exist.”
Habash said that Andreas has a bright future ahead of him.
“I’m hoping to hear a lot more about him in the future,” Habash said. “I think he’ll make us proud.”
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