Yale Les Aspin Fellowship

The Les Aspin '60 International Public Service Fellowships were established by the Yale College Class of 1960 to honor the memory of their classmate,

The Aspin Fellowship

In academic terms, the Les Aspin Fellowship awards are summer research grants, useful for rising Yale juniors and seniors to sip at the cup of public service to see whether they might like it or not. That is a good function, maybe good enough to justify the time, costs and energies required to make it work. However, the Aspin Fellowship is broader and more important than tha

t: it is a kind of bond between and among Yale generations. The Class of 1960, Les Aspin’s class, thinks that experiencing making a living while in some form of public service is a valuable and estimable thing to do, and offers a bit of support for current students. Class of 1960 alumni are therefore investing in the future of current Yale students, so an intergenerational bond is established. Among Aspin laureates themselves, particularly among those who continue in some from of public service, a sense a common bond develops from being fellow Aspinites and having benefitted from Yale’s encouragement towards public service. The Aspin Committee is experimenting with various modes of keeping contact with our laureates and encouraging their contact with each other. Together with Aspinite alums still on campus, we sponsor send-off dinners and back-to-campus lunches for current-year Aspinites; we invite Aspinites on campus to join us for our annual evaluation of the workings of the Fellowship; we meet with each laureate at least once during the summer; we host an end-of-summer gathering for those working in Washington (usually a plurality of Aspinites); we periodically survey Aspinites to see what they are doing and if they think that the Fellowship helped them; and our Newsletter is in its second year of publication. Our goal is to develop our simple summer research grants into a basis for enduring Fellowship of those lucky and plucky enough to have been selected for The Aspin. All three of our Class Fellowships are intergenerational bridges. They give Classmates a way to engage, and be engaged by, current Yale undergraduates and to maintain active interests in what Yale is doing. Our flesh and blood interviews of applicants are more personal, even humane, than the more bureaucratic processes run by busy Yale faculty members; and our Fellowships are the only ones that we know of in which alumni are responsible for the core of fellowship administration. We are showing that our brand of fellowships is a highly effective way of mining the energies, resources, and even wisdom of alumni in service of Yale and its students. I personally hope that our alumni-run fellowships will be noticed as precedents and be followed by other classes at Yale and possibly even by engaged alumni of other first-rate schools and universities. Charles Schmitz
Chairman, Class of 1960 Les Aspin Fellowship Committee

Photos from Yale Les Aspin Fellowship's post

11/12/2016

Aspin's Back-to-Campus gathering took place November 7 at The Studio Hotel Lounge. Present were Alexander Minsun Cha, Axex Tymchenko and Stephanie Siow. Jonathan Esty was detained in Brooklyn to continue work on Hilary's election campaign. Co-Chair Charles Schmitz came up from Washington to participate on behalf of the Class of 1960/1986 Aspin Selection Committee. The current Aspinites discussed some of the most important aspects of their summer work and how their experiences were informing their future professional plans. Below: Minsun, Alex, Stephanie, and the 2016 Whiffs at Mory's.

05/11/2016

05/09/2016

Nathan Hale: One of Yale's Aspinite precursors

05/09/2016

The Class of 1960/1986 Aspin Fellowship Selection Committee:

Owen Cylke ’60: Yale Law ’63. Retired. Formerly Career Minister, US Foreign Service, USAID; Senior Fellow, WWF.

Doug Guiler ’60: Spent 28 years in the US Army as a Russian area specialist, and later with DoD as a policy analyst with expertise in arms control. He has served in Germany, Vietnam, the Netherlands, and with the US OSCE mission in Vienna, Austria.

Gary Eisenberg ’86: Partner with the law firm of Perkins Coie LLP, a major national law firm. He specializes in complex commercial litigation, bankruptcy and structured finance. He is the author of a sports history book called The Games That Rate and strives to follow the Page of the Day Talmud study regimen.

Caroline Fredrickson ’86: President of the American Constitution Society (ACS), senior fellow at Demos, author of Under the Bus: How Working Women Are Being Run Over.

Harry Mazadoorian ’60: Commercial arbitrator and mediator and is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Quinnipiac University School of Law Center on Dispute Resolution.

Bill Monahan ’86: Deputy Assistant Secretary for Regional Security and Security Assistance at U.S. Department of State; former Counsel for Senate Armed Services Committee.

Charles Schmitz ’60 Chairman: Lawyer-diplomat, U.S. Foreign Service Officer (ret.); Political Advisor of Commander in Chief, U.S. Air Forces, Europe; Chairman and Co-Founder of Global Business Access, Ltd.; Director of Yale’s Stimson Seminar on International Affairs, Policy and Practice; General Counsel, The Prospective Group, LLC.

Fritz Steele ’60: Consultant, Steele Associates.

Jim Trowbridge ’60: Management Consultant, Partner, Contribution Management, Inc.; Program Consultant, Program Officer (Africa, Latin America, and U.S. programs) the Ford Foundation; President, Albert Schweitzer Institute; Ass’t. Secy. Gen., Religions for Peace; Senior Advisor, New Rules for Global Finance.

04/28/2016

2016 Aspin Fellowship Recipients

The Yale Class of 1960 Les Aspin Fellowship has selected four undergraduates to receive Aspin funding for their summer projects and internships in 22016.

Minsun Cha (PC, 2017-18) majoring in Global Affairs and East Asian Studies, will intern in the International Affairs Department at the North Korea Strategy Center in Seoul, Korea. The Center is a defector-led, non-partisan think tank that undertakes research and promotes action on North Korean issues based on principles of freedom of expression and freedom of information. Minsun hopes to synthesize what she has learned at Yale to develop means for encouraging socio-economic development at the grass roots level in North Korea.

Jonathan Esty (DC, 2017) majoring in History, will work as an intern in the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. Jonathan hopes to learn how US foreign policymakers interact with NATO and European Union partners in the day-to-day world of policy and decision-making. He has loved studying the facts and patterns of history, but seeks a bridge that will enable him to gain experience in the inner workings of America’s defense and foreign policy apparatus engaged in the most pressing areas: from ensuring security in the post-conflict states of the Balkans, to containing or cooperating with a resurgent Russia, to managing Turkey as a critical regional ally in the broader Syria/Iraq civil war.

Stephanie Siow (PC, 2017), majoring in Global Affairs, will continue her research and aid victims of human trafficking at Freedom for All in New York City. Stephanie will conduct research on the links between international migration and human trafficking, particularly of Asians, Through interviews with clients and healthcare professionals, she will explore how international recruitment functions among marginalized communities, and how these channels can be stopped. Stephanie speaks Mandarin, Japanese, and Indonesian.

Alexander Tymchenko (ES, 2017) majoring in Computer Science, will work as an information technology intern at the U.S. Mission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels, Belgium. An officer candidate in Yale’s Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps, Alexander says that he holds service to country and service to others to be the most important callings an individual can pursue.

[Photos below: Cha, Esty, Siow, Tymchenko]

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