Trinity Hanif ’26 earns Rotary Global Grant Fellowship to fund master’s program abroad at London School of Economics and Political Science

At Carleton, the winter and spring terms see many fellowship acceptances, and another student was recently added to the list of recipients!

Trinity Hanif ’26 has been accepted to the Rotary Foundation Global Grant Fellowship, a program that provides graduate school funding for students hailing from Rotary International’s District 5960, which encompasses eastern St. Paul, southeastern Minnesota, and parts of western Wisconsin. Carleton’s Office of Student Fellowships provides support to Carleton students applying to Rotary programs.

The Rotary Global Grant specifically covers one year of a student’s master’s program at any accredited international institution, with the intention of channeling one of the Rotary Foundation’s seven “areas of focus”: peace and conflict prevention/resolution, disease prevention and treatment, water and sanitation, maternal and child health, basic education and literacy, economic and community development, and environment. Kai Oishi ’24, for example, funded a master’s degree in urban management and development at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Anna Ursin ’25 funded a Master’s of Philosophy in the Population Health Sciences program at the University of Cambridge.

Hanif will use her grant to fund a Master of Science in the Gender, Peace, and Security program at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with an interest in feminist security studies. She’s most excited about going to where the knowledge and research on feminist security studies is most concentrated.

“Generally, when I do research into different topics within this realm, a lot of the scholars are coming from the UK, and some of them even work at the programs that I’ve been applying to,” she said. “I’m really excited to get a deeper dive into this topic… [and] have just an overload of offerings to choose from.”

Hanif originally searched for domestic master’s programs, but found that they took more national security-focused and state-centric approaches than international universities with more critical security studies, which aligned better with her academic focus at Carleton. When she started looking for fellowships that would sponsor one of these master’s programs abroad, the Rotary Global Grant stood out.

After completing her program through the Rotary grant, Hanif hopes to pursue migration and international human rights law as a career, understanding how “security interests intersect with migration.”

“My end goal is law school,” she said. “Law school gives you an education into what legal systems look like, and your role within those systems, but it’s less about the specific area you want to focus on, so before I go to law school, I want a deeper dive into the area I’m studying. That’s why I want to do a master’s.”

The Rotary Global Grant emphasizes connecting an individual’s educational goals with their career path, which Hanif embodies through her plans to enrich her law school education with the depth of a master’s degree. 

Hanif detailed how her academic, extracurricular, and career-related activities all intersected over her time at Carleton, allowing her to grow the blend of interests in feminist security studies, human migration, and law that she brings to the Rotary Global Grant. Her sophomore year winter term, she took POSC 280: Feminist Security Studies with Summer Forester, associate professor of political science and international relations, despite not knowing much at all about the topic, and it proved to be highly influential. 

“The class really changed my whole worldview,” she said. “Honestly, every day I felt like I came out of class just looking at the world differently… I never thought about the things that I was learning in [that] class before.”

Hanif has taken a course with Forester each term ever since, and explained that “it definitely put me on this path… and every term, it pushes me further into [realizing] this is something I really enjoy.” 

Building on her interests from that sophomore year course, Hanif spent the following summer working with Europe Cares, an NGO based in Lesbos, Greece that provides social services to refugees and migrants. 

“I was on the ground seeing the consequences of security policies — how they affect people’s lives and the trauma people have experienced as a result of state and EU security policies,” she said. “I’m really interested in getting an academic perspective, so I can have more of a theoretical framework to think about and make sense of my experiences [with Europe Cares].”

Going forward, even as she gets her advanced degree, Hanif is excited to get involved in more opportunities outside academic institutions, similar to Europe Cares, at the intersection of gender-based violence alleviation, migration, and security studies, in whichever area of the world the Rotary Global Grant takes her.

And for current students potentially interested in this program, Hanif has one major piece of advice:

“Being able to articulate what you’re passionate about, why you’re passionate about it, and how you think that passion can make a difference is really important,” she said. “I think that’s the biggest component of a successful application.”

Learn more about the Rotary Global Grant Fellowship on the Office of Student Fellowships website.