Two Amherst College seniors have been awarded Thomas J. Watson Fellowships to explore how other cultures deal with two basic products of human life: laughter and garbage.
David Beron Echavarria ’15 and Richard Altieri ’15 will spend 2015–2016 abroad, learning about, respectively, international methods of waste management and world styles of standup comedy.
Born in Colombia and raised in Ecuador, Echavarria has early memories of his mother donning rubber gloves to dig through a community composting center. Now he looks toward a career in environmental and development economics, with the goal of taking a leadership role in mitigating the damaging effects of human civilization upon the environment.
Echavarria, who is majoring in environmental studies and economics, said he plans to travel to Argentina, Egypt, Singapore and Sweden in order to study traditional, technological and policy-based ways to handle postconsumer waste.
“I will engage with and learn from various communities that are reducing, collecting, processing, reusing, and recycling waste in unusually innovative ways,” he wrote in his application for the Watson Fellowship.
This will include traveling among Argentina’s cartoneros—the 40,000 unionized cardboard collectors—and the Zabbaleen of Cairo, whose tradition of using pigs to manage organic waste has recently come under attack by the authorities.
Altieri, who majors in philosophy and is fluent in Chinese and Spanish, said he wants to challenge the idea that jokes don’t translate.
“As a cross-cultural humorist, I intend to re-conceive comedic forms and bring people together through laughter,” he wrote in his Watson application. He plans to pursue an advanced degree in philosophy of humor, and eventually build a career as a writer, performer and teacher.
For his Watson year, Altieri intends to immerse himself in the comedic traditions of four cities: Santiago de Chile, Taipei, Singapore and London. He plans to attend stand-up comedy open-mics and other shows, while staying with a host family to “see what makes a family laugh at the dinner table.” Then he will take to the microphone himself, with local comedians as guides. The intended result is to “reinterpret regional styles and reimagine American forms of comedy,” said Altieri, currently a member of Mr. Gad’s House of Improv, a student improv comedy troupe at Amherst.
The Thomas J. Watson Foundation was created in 1961 in honor of the founder of International Business Machines (IBM). Each Watson Fellow receives $25,000 for 12 months of travel, college loan assistance as needed and an insurance allowance.
This year, close to 700 candidates at select private liberal arts colleges and universities submitted proposals for Watson Fellowships. Of that number, 150 finalists were nominated to compete on the national level. Echavarria and Altieri were among 50 fellows selected from 19 states and eight countries.
Amherst has had 89 Watson Fellows during the program’s history.