Albert Ananyan ’24 has been selected as a Schwarzman Scholar for the program’s 2024-2025 academic year. Schwarzman Scholars complete a one-year, fully-funded master’s degree program in global affairs at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Tsinghua University is one of China’s top universities and Schwarzman Scholars is one of the world’s most prestigious graduate fellowship programs. Ananyan is the first Trinity student to be a Schwarzman Scholar since the program’s creation in 2016.
The 2024-2025 cohort includes 150 scholars from 43 countries and 114 universities around the world. “The impressive caliber of this year’s admitted students and the near-record high number of applicants demonstrate that young leaders are increasingly invested in understanding China and fostering global collaboration,” reports Schwarzman Scholars. The Class of 2025 was selected from a pool of over 4,000 candidates.
Ananyan cites his favorite classes at Trinity and while studying abroad as his inspiration for applying to Schwarzman Scholars. “Throughout my undergraduate journey, some courses have profoundly shaped my career aspirations. These include Professor Matsuzaki’s Comparative Politics of East Asia, the statebuilding seminar, Professor Milmanda’s Comparative Political Economy, and the Politics of China course during my study abroad in England. These classes fueled my ambition for studying adaptive governance and sparked academic curiosity about China’s economic opening.”
Ananyan’s strong academic record, demonstrated success as a community- and globally-minded leader, and his entrepreneurial aptitude were highlighted in his application and interview.
“Albert has extensive experience in grassroots civic engagement and research in Armenia, which grounds his academic and intellectual interests within concrete experiences and problems faced by developing countries. He has also demonstrated a heightened entrepreneurial spirit and has taken on various leadership positions at Trinity, Armenia, and beyond. He embodies, more so than any other student that I have met, the mission of the Schwarzman Scholars program,” writes Reo Matsuzaki, Associate Professor of Political Science and one of Ananyan’s academic advisers.
The Center for Urban and Global Studies (CUGS) promotes the Schwarzman Scholars program at Trinity. Ananyan’s path to Schwarzman Scholars included a couple of prior touchpoints with CUGS. In summer 2022, Ananyan completed a research project titled, “Community Enlargement and Political Participation in Rural Dilijan, Armenia,” supported by the Grossman Global Studies Fund under CUGS. In summer 2023, Ananyan was selected to conduct a Project for Peace. For this project, he created a textile training center in Dilijan aimed at promoting the economic and social integration of Artsakh refugees into the community. More than two hundred refugees participated in trainings in the space in the summer of 2023. The training center is still operating today through a local NGO.
On the significance of this achievement for the Trinity community, Garth Myers, Director of the Center for Urban and Global Studies and Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies, says, “While of course Albert was selected because of his outstanding file and exceptional interview, I think it reflects well on Trinity as an excellent liberal arts college to have one of our students chosen. Indirectly, it connects with the leadership of my predecessor as CUGS Director, Dr. Xiangming Chen, in building Trinity’s strong relationships with Chinese higher education over the last 15 years, too, which helps put Trinity ‘on the map’ for a top-tier institution like Tsinghua University.”
As a Schwarzman Scholar, Ananyan is most looking forward to “the intensive one-week themed field trip to regions throughout China. A significant challenge in current academia is the lack of practical experience, often leaving students with theoretical knowledge but without a grasp of on-the-ground realities. I look forward to visiting rural China and exploring the institutional design of their rural development projects.”
While Ananyan is the first Trinity student selected as a Schwarzman Scholar, we hope this achievement will inspire future students to follow in his footsteps to understand the critical role of China in shaping the future of our world.
