In December 2024, the Eugene M. Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility announced the Lang Opportunity Scholarship (LOS) winners from the Class of 2027: Amelia Crill, Sarah Cymrot, Pedro Ennes, and Chung Sze Kwok. This cohort joins the hundreds of Lang Opportunity Scholars since the program’s inception in the 1980s.
In email correspondence with The Phoenix, Senior Associate Director of the Lang Center Jen Magee described the purpose of the LOS program, founded by Eugene M. Lang ’38. Students would be able to receive funding “to conceive, design and carry out a project that creates a needed social resource and/or effects a significant social change or improved condition of a community in the United States or abroad.” Currently, it is one of the oldest, multi-year, undergraduate funding programs in the country, ensuring that college students have the resources and funding in order to create and implement their projects, all while taking a full course load.
Over the course of the next three years, the Scholars will receive advising and coursework relating to project planning through implementation. While the framework and goals of the LOS program have remained relatively unchanged since its inception, some of the educational strategies have shifted in the past 10 years to align with a more multidimensional approach to community engagement. According to Magee, contemporary community engagement includes, “grounding projects in partnerships that are focused on assets and desires rather than damage-based frameworks[…]; deep contextual and functional knowledge through both curricular and co-curricular education; skill development in systems change to reduce ‘band-aid fixes’ and to create interventions that disrupt systems that hold social problems in place.” Current LOS students will mold their projects around these concepts.
Each member of the LOS Class of 2027 has built their project around their personal passions and lived experiences. Amelia Crill created her project after an eye-opening summer researching lead contamination in Washington public schools at the University of Washington, in combination with her work with C4, a student-chapter organization of CRCQL (Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living), at Swarthmore. After learning about lead’s adverse effects, especially in children, Crill wondered what the impact could possibly be in Chester, PA, where the population doesn’t “have the funds or the investment from the government to replace lead infrastructure.” She plans to work with the Chester Lead Task Force to collect data on lead contamination, begin educating the public on at-risk populations and protection strategies, and access and distribute government funding to the community.
Like Magee, Crill stressed the importance of educated community engagement. As an engineering major and environmental studies minor, she admits “that engineers and a lot of academics in general have created a precedent of creating more problems than solving them.” She hopes to avoid this paradox in the future by using the skills she has learned in PEAC 009, Introduction to Engaged Scholarship, a course that all the Scholars take in their sophomore spring semester.
Sarah Cymrot’s project was drawn from a highly impactful personal experience: surviving a stroke in early adolescence. However, its true inspiration arose from Cymrot’s experience outside of the hospital. In order to cope with the lack of support outside of an enclosed medical institution, she turned to writing. Cymrot notes that after writing, she “was able to breathe for the first time. It made [my stroke] fit in a way that other attempts hadn’t. So I come to this project with this deep personal belief in what writing can do at these times in people’s lives.”
Cymrot aims to work with both outpatient services and adolescent patients in the Philadelphia area to establish Patient’s Notes, a series of workshops where patients can begin to grapple with their medical experiences through personal narrative writing. She emphasizes that “narrative serves as both an empowering tool, in an often dehumanizing space where the patient’s voice isn’t valued, but then also a way of figuring out which way is up, a way of making meaning out of these chaotic experiences that make no sense.”
Pedro Ennes plans to create a mentorship program for undocumented high school students in Philadelphia. He hopes to pair students with similarly undocumented undergraduates to provide support and encouragement to pursue higher education. Ennes pulls from his previous experiences coming from a high school with a large immigrant community. He worked at a non-profit advocating and creating college-access work for immigrant students, many of whom were undocumented. Ennes continues this mission at Swarthmore on the executive board of Swatties for Immigrant Rights, an affinity group focusing on the advocacy and community needed for undocumented students. With the LOS, Ennes aims to expand this work.
Ennes cites the support he received from other Lang Scholars as a driving force in generating his project. He describes the application process as “one of the toughest applications that [he’s] had to do before,” but mentors in the tight-knit LOS community encouraged him to persevere and gave him feedback along the way. Ennes has been able to work with Eduardo Burgos ’22, a graduated Lang Scholar, who also geared his project around immigrant rights. Burgos even helped Ennes connect with the nonprofit organization that Ennes hopes to work with this summer.
Chung Sze Kwok developed her project drawing from her experience as a Hong Kong immigrant to the United Kingdom and as a teacher in the same region. She explains that after the UK established a new visa protocol for Hong Kong nationals, there was a rise in immigration. What’s important, she notes, is that “unlike previous migrant groups in U.K. history, Hong Kong families are considerably more dispersed and have chosen to settle away from large city centers. Families are scattered across small towns and suburbs, where schools are less likely to have had experience addressing the challenges that arise from an influx of recently-arrived immigrant students.” As a teacher in the United Kingdom, she was expected to teach a wide range of English language learners without a systematic structure in place to support both the immigrant students and the teachers. Thus, she hopes to forge connections between the two groups through dialogues and put into practice new pedagogical techniques.
All four Lang Scholars applied for the program as sophomores in the fall of 2024. While the Scholars acknowledged the application’s difficulty (Kwok noted that it was “one of the harder things [she’s] had to do at Swarthmore”), many of them expressed their pride in its completion and how it pushed them to refine their ideas. When asked about her application process, Cymrot explained that “one of the things that [she] really enjoyed about the process was the opportunity to think through this idea that [she] was excited about no matter what the outcome would be.” For the incoming sophomores, this year’s Lang Scholars have advice for attacking the application process:
Amelia Crill: “Start thinking about your project early, before the start of sophomore year [with] brainstorming and doing a lot of preliminary research. I think for me, having a lot of conversations with people in the first month of sophomore year was very informative. I feel like the more that we can think about why your particular area of focus is important to you, the better. Having conversations with stakeholders who are involved is crucial: you have to demonstrate that you’re not just someone from a prestigious university going out and trying to solve the problem in a marginalized community because they won’t like that at all.”
Sarah Cymrot: “Find something you’re excited about and want to think about … one of the things that I’m really looking forward to about my project is that this is the work that I want to be doing. This is the way I want to be thinking and acting … This is an opportunity to do this really exciting work and make the kind of impact that you want to make.”
Pedro Ennes: “I feel like if you really love what you’re doing with your project and you really love this idea, that is gonna shine through in the application, right? I think that was one of the main factors for me, that I have this love for my project that I made sure to get through the application and the interview: to show the people who are looking at my application that this is a project founded on love. To summarize it, know what you want, know what you’re doing, and make sure that shines through the applications.
Chung Sze Kwok: “Definitely don’t say no to yourself: think of it as a possibility and then talk to people about it. I think that was definitely the most helpful thing … And find the people in your corner, I think. I really don’t think I could have done this without the support system that I had.”
With the funding and mentorship from the Lang Opportunity Scholarship, the Class of 2027 can begin to outline their plans to help communities in need, turning their ideas into meaningful, lasting change.
