Benjamin Karp, chosen as a senior at Vanderbilt, in Nashville, stood out among the applicants with the first sentence of his essay, in which he declared himself “an unusual applicant for this scholarship.”
“I study nanomaterials in a physics lab, teach whitewater kayaking, could identify an adverbial phrase and spot a misplaced comma a mile away,” he wrote. He’s also possibly the first applicant to use the phrase “dimensional analysis” in describing how he rooted out an error during an internship. Majoring in both physics and English, he made a persuasive and witty case for greater numeracy among our ranks.
Karp interned at USA Today and was a Dow Jones intern for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where he also did some enterprise reporting. As his Star Tribune supervisor noted, “It’s nice to have an intern with such strengths in science and math.”
