School Notes: Yale College
July/August 2013

Award honors deceased alumna

The inaugural Marina Keegan Award for Excellence in Playwriting was presented in April to Nicole Davis ’13 at a ceremony in the Saybrook College library. The award honors Marina Keegan ’12 (SY), the playwright, essayist, fiction writer, and activist, who died in a car accident only days after she graduated last year. 

A celebration of Keegan’s life and creative spirit, the event was timed to take place while many of her friends, notably in this year’s graduating class, were still on campus. Her parents, Tracy and Kevin Keegan, and three of her Yale teachers and mentors—Anne Fadiman, Donald Margulies, and Deb Margolin—offered remarks.

Keegan wrote several plays. Her musical Independents was chosen by the New York International Fringe Festival for a full-scale production. Another play, Utility Monster, will be performed May 25–June 22 at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, in Keegan’s hometown on Cape Cod. Perhaps her most memorable work is “The Opposite of Loneliness,” a piece she wrote for her classmates on the eve of their graduation.

Alumna wins Gates scholarship

Naomi Woo ’12 (BR), a double major in music and mathematics & philosophy currently completing a master’s degree at the Yale School of Music, has been awarded a 2013 Gates scholarship for postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge. Woo, a Canadian—considered for the scholarship in a later round than her American peers—is the third student from Yale to receive the prestigious honor this year. She will pursue music studies at the University of Cambridge next year.

Senior awarded Soros fellowship

Sejal Hathi ’13 (BR) is among this year’s winners of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. Hathi, a US Presidential Scholar and a Truman Scholar, graduated this May with a BS in molecular biology. An advocate for women’s rights, she has been recognized by Newsweek (150 Women who Shake the World), Forbes magazine (30 under 30 honorees), and the National Jefferson Awards for Public Service. She plans to earn her MD at Stanford Medical School and then work in medical entrepreneurship, international women’s health, and social innovation.