From foster care and astronomy to cowboying

Three Gates Cambridge Scholars will talk about their unique personal experiences at an event on Wednesday.

Three Gates Cambridge Scholars will tell personal stories ranging from a year spent at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, cowboying and life in foster care at an event on Wednesday.

The Scholar Stories session will hear from Rebecca Charbonneau, Erik Rudicky and Rob Henderson.

Rebecca's talk, Where the Wired Things Are: Life Amongst the Radio Telescopes in the Mountain, will focus on the year she spent working at NASA and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) before she started her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science. She says: "I am going to focus on the eight months I spent at NRAO, working and living as a historian amongst scientists in the mountains of Charlottesville, Virginia and Green Bank, West Virginia."

Rebecca [2018] will cover the challenges and surprises of living and working in the National Radio Quiet Zone; the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; and life in Charlottesville in the year after the white supremacist rally.

Erik Rudicky's talk Cowboying for Fun and Profit will address questions such as how does the stereotypical image of a cowboy stack up against the modern reality? How could cowboying change your life and how could you change the ways in which you cowboy to benefit the environment? And what do you need to do to become a cowboy and what if you wanted to run the show and start your own livestock operation?

Erik [2018], who is doing a PhD in Politics and International Studies, will draw on his experience of horse training in California and livestock management in Florida and Montana and talk about holistic management of grasslands and the economic realities of ranching for first-generation ranchers and farmers.

Rob Henderson's talk, Hide These In Your Locker, is about his experience growing up in California. Rob [2018], who is doing a PhD in Psychology, was born into poverty to an immigrant mother. When he was two, his mother’s drug addiction caused him to be placed into the Los Angeles County foster care system. He lived in seven different homes over the next five years. Since then, he says he has reflected on what qualities enable people to overcome adversity. "From foster care, to a broken home, to military service and then Yale, I have found a couple of answers," says Rob, who has recently signed with a literary agency to write a memoir about these experiences. 

*The event on January 30th begins at 7:30pm in the GSCR. Gates Cambridge Scholars and their guests are welcome. Picture credit: Wikimedia commons and -oo0(GoldTrader)0oo-.