B.PAPM grad Ian Denhez will be pursuing his M.Phil in Comparative Government at the University of Oxford in September, and has been awarded a prestigious Mackenzie King Travelling Scholarship. Established in the will of former prime minister William Mackenzie King, four Travelling Scholarships are awarded each year to Canadian students pursuing graduate degrees in the United Kingdom or the United States in the areas of international relations or industrial relations.
Ian was awarded the University Medal when he graduated from the B.PAPM in 2010. Determined to learn Mandarin, he went to China to teach English. He then won a scholarship from the Shandong provincial government that provided him with accommodation and a living stipend so that he could study Chinese language and culture full time. The scholarship also allowed him to travel widely – as far as Xinjiang on the border of Tajikistan – and he set about climbing all nine of China’s sacred mountains.
While a student in the B.PAPM, he was a key member of the Carleton Model UN team, for which he won the outstanding delegate award at competitions at Harvard and in New York. He was also selected as one of a small number of Kroeger College students to participate in Prof. Allan Thompson’s Rwanda Initiative and he spent the bulk of the summer of 2009 living and working as an intern with the Gisozi Genocide Memorial Centre in Kigali.
At Oxford, he will be a student at Merton College, which was founded in the 1260s. North American visitors to Merton, Ian recounts, are invariably reminded that the doors of the Front Hall are three times as old as the United States of America.