Elisabeth Siegel ’16, a Mitra Grant recipient during her senior year at Harker, has had her Mitra paper, titled “Ideology through Subliminal Propaganda: A Critique of Portrayals of Palestine and Palestinians in Israeli and Western Online News Media during Operation Protective Edge,” published by Yale Review of International Studies! http://yris.yira.org/essays/2005.

Harker history teacher Damon Halback, who mentored Siegel while she wrote the paper, spotted Siegel’s Facebook post, and noted she had added a call to action to current Harker students:

“HARKER STUDENTS — if you still have the chance to apply for a Near/Mitra grant, PLEASE do. It was definitely one of the highlights of my time in high school. It took me on so many unexpected twists and turns, from learning practical skills like writing natural language processing stuff to aid a social science paper as well as not leaving footnotes till the last week before the due date, as well as less tangible things, like determination and self-drive, how much of my life I’d taken for granted, and much more. DO IT!”

Halback also added a special kudos to his colleagues who help administer and manage the endowment papers process. “This is a credit to all the hard work put in every year by Donna [Gilbert, history department chair], Sue [Smith, library director], Meredith [Cranston, upper school librarian] and Lauri [Vaughan, upper school campus librarian] to make Near/Mitra such a wonderful example of the scholarly values that Harker promotes,” he said.

The deadline to apply for a John Near or Mitra Family endowment grant is April 21 at 6 p.m. Details can be found here: http://library.harker.org/Scholars/ScholarApps