Two seniors-Jessica Bernstein and Zane Riester – won prestigious Thomas J. Watson Traveling Fellowships this spring.
Their success brings to forty-two the number of Union students who have been named Watson Fellows since the program began in 1969.
Jessica Bernstein '97 never thought her formidable skill in Tae Kwon Do would do her much good in an interview. But there she was,
in front of the Watson committee, performing a series of kicks and punches.
Her demonstration of the ancient Korean martial art-combined with her thoughtful analysis of its meaning for women in modern culture-earned her an $18,000 Watson Fellowship. Starting in August, she will study female Tae Kwon Do artists in South Korea, Great Britain, and Norway.
“I want to find out what these women's stories are, how Tae Kwon Do is helping them in their lives, how they are training, what their goals are,” says Bernstein, a philosophy major. “The web of communication in women's Tae Kwon Do is not established at all. I just want to put together a piece of literature releasing these women's voices so that someone who has the same questions I have can find out something about it.”
Bernstein says she wants to find out why so few women practice Tae Kwon Do, why so few attain levels of authority in the sport, and what draws women into the sport. A first-degree black belt who hopes one day to become an instructor, she also wants to learn how westernization and competition have affected the 2,000-year-old art form.
As a teenager competing in Junior Olympic national tournaments across the country, Bernstein witnessed political clashes between organizations, disagreements between instructors, and parents who protest referee decisions. She also found what she thinks is a product
driven approach-” belt factories”-that accelerate students through the ranks.
She also has found that many schools use fear to draw women into classes. “Self defense is an aspect of Tae Kwon Do, but it's not the most important thing
that women can gain from it,” she says. “There's a whole other spiritual side of it that is very empowering.”
During her Watson fellowship, Bernstein will spend six months in South Korea, visiting a Buddhist temple that is a shrine to Tae Kwon Do statuary as well as a number of the 1,100 institutes that teach the martial art. She then will spend three months in England, observing women Tae Kwon Do artists in a western country, followed by three months in Norway, a country whose progressive and liberal views she expects will provide an interesting contrast.
“I knew that I wanted to apply for the Watson and that it had to be a good idea,” she says. “Rather than search
outside of myself, I looked at my personal experience in Tae Kwon Do and the questions that I've wanted to answer. It's a beautiful and amazing art form. When I teach Tae Kwon Do, I want to be the best teacher that I can be.”
Waiting for his train back to Union at the end of winter break during his sophomore year,
Zane Riester '97 saw on the wall of Penn Station a photo of what he thought was St. Peter's Church in Rome.
He had just studied the grand and beautiful example of Renaissance church architecture in his Introduction to Architecture class. Then he read the caption: Pennsylvania Station, 1906.
“It was the first time I realized that the original Penn Station had been destroyed,” the senior recalls. “I couldn't believe what I saw-it was as if they were taunting me with pictures of this grand original structure in such a dismal, atrophied place.”
That moment and subsequent “rediscoveries” of Grand Central Station stirred in Riester a fascination with the architectural similarities between Renaissance churches and turn-of-the-century Beaux-Arts train stations. So began an obsession that recently earned the New York City native an $18,000 Watson Fellowship to carry on his investigation next year at churches and train stations in Italy, France, and the United Kingdom.
“These buildings share so much in common in terms of an architectural vocabulary
columns, symmetry, temple fronts, a grand hall-and the emotional response they invoke in the viewer,” says Riester, a political science major and history minor. “They are awesome, amazing, and humbling.”
In his proposal to the Watson Foundation, Riester wrote, “While it risks blasphemy to compare a train to the grand significance of God, churches and stations are in their respective ways visions of power, strength, and glory. Train stations thus had to be large imposing structures much like the cathedrals and churches of Europe.” Train stations also were symbols of a town's prosperity, a function once served by churches, he notes. Because of their central importance, stations employed the highest degree of design and adornment, just as churches had done centuries before.
Stations, like churches, also serve a role in integrating members of society. “A lot of different people from different social classes come to a church for different reasons,” he says. “It's the same for the stations. The poor will go to the steps of a church just as they go to the steps of a train station.”
And stations, like churches centuries before, reflected the spirit of society. “In the previous generation, there was a sense of romance with travel, which was something new to society.
The trains were the first to play a role in connecting everything. It was more than just a railroad. It was about the development of society.”
Riester says his analysis will use black and white photography, interviews, and archival research. He plans to spend about four months each in Italy, France, and England. He hopes to share his discoveries through a Web site and possibly a CD ROM. “Nothing could be more fitting for a study of the technological progress of one age than to use the technology of my own,” he says.
After his Watson, Riester says, he would like to go to architecture school.