Byron Miller a junior at Hamilton College, has been selected as an American Political Science Association Summer Fellow with the Ralph Bunche Institute, to be held this summer at Duke University.
Sponsored jointly by the National Science Foundation, Duke University, and the American Political Science Association, the Bunche Institute is designed to introduce highly qualified students of color to graduate school and to encourage their application to Ph.D. programs in political science. While living at Duke, the students spend five weeks in two graduate-level courses taught by distinguished members of Duke's faculty and attend weekly lunches and dinners with visiting scholars from around the country.
Miller, a history and government major at Hamilton, spent the fall semester as an intern with the U.S. Department of Justice: Environment and Natural Resources Division in Washington. He also served as an intern for U.S. Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL). Miller spent last summer as a volunteer intern with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa in Cape Town, South Africa.
At Hamilton, he is Student Assembly president of the class of 2002, a resident advisor, an intern in the departments of government and economics, a teaching assistant for the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture, a member of the Judicial Board, a member of the Hamilton Union Parliamentary Debate Society and president of Hamilton College Democrats. He also participated in a four-week research tour of Kenya in 2000. Miller plans to return to Cape Town this summer with funding from the Casstevens Fund and the Emerson Summer Grant prgram to do independent research. Miller, the son of Ms. Mary Miller of Chicago, is a graduate of the Brooks School.
The Bunche Summer Institute is designed to encourage minority students to attend graduate school in political science, thus increasing the diversity of the profession.
The Institute is academically rigorous and strives to simulate the graduate school experience for 15-20 rising seniors each summer, chosen through a nationally competitive application process. The focus of this summer's Institute will be Race and American Politics and at the end of the term, each student will produce original research.
The Institute's namesake, Ralph Bunche, a 1934 Harvard University graduate, was the first African American to receive a doctorate in political science and the first to serve as the president of the American Political Science Association. In 1950, he also became the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Hamilton College is a highly selective residential college offering a rigorous liberal arts curriculum. Students are challenged to think, write and speak critically, creatively and analytically, so that upon graduation, they may distinguish themselves in both their professions and their communities.
