A Yearlong Quest

Fall 2024
By Robyn Ross

On the third morning of her Watson Fellowship, a yearlong trip around the world to study the topic that most intrigued her, Kirsty Leech fell apart. It was a glorious August day in the tiny Dutch village of Schoonhoven, and Leech was finishing breakfast with her good friend Mijke Roelfsema ’22 and Roelfsema’s parents and sister. The family had offered to host Leech on the first leg of a journey that would ultimately take her to eight countries to learn how disability shapes families around the globe. As sunlight streamed into the Roelfsemas’ kitchen, Mijke turned to her friend. “So, how is your sister doing back home in Houston?”

Leech opened her mouth to answer, but the words crumbled into a sob. She had been granted a singular opportunity, a fully funded 12 months to travel anywhere in the world for her research. Her love for her sister, and her hunger to understand families like hers in other countries, had brought her here. But to answer her questions, she had to leave her sister behind. 

It had been a difficult choice for Leech, and in the past few days she had realized how difficult her absence would be for her family. Mijke’s innocent query had unleashed a flood of homesickness and impostor syndrome, and Leech, who never cried around other people, came undone.

Still, she says now, “It’s the moments when you are forced to confront those difficulties, and you make it out the other side, that make you grow on your Watson as much as any of the research.” She collected herself and listened as the Roelfsemas assured her she was doing the right thing. As she prepared for her first research meeting, she reminded herself: “The only person that will get you through this year is you.”

An Itinerary of Inquiry

Each year, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, established in 1968 and named for the CEO who led IBM to global prominence in the first half of the 20th century, supports graduating seniors from 40 partner institutions — including Rice — to conduct independent research projects outside the United States. Recipients are awarded a $40,000 stipend; health insurance; a year of student loan payments, as needed; and the freedom to design (and change) their own itinerary. The New York-based Watson Foundation sets just a few guidelines for fellows: They cannot enroll in graduate school or hold a formal, paid job during their Watson year. Every quarter, they send an update about their project, and they should not return to the U.S. until their fellowship year is over. 

The Watson Foundation’s vision is that the world needs more humane and effective leaders, a goal served by encouraging students to expand their vision and develop their potential on a world scale, says executive director Chris Kasabach. “The confidence and perspective that’s grown from designing and engaging a project built from your deepest interests becomes a renewable resource that lasts a lifetime,” he says.

When Leech applied for the fellowship, a mentor explained that a Watson topic should be something so fundamental to her identity that she could remain driven to pursue her project for an entire year on her own. As she considered potential subjects, she realized that every aspect of her identity and her goals had been shaped by her family’s experiences with disability.

Her older sister, Jemma, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair for mobility and a facilitated communication device to speak. Leech’s twin brother, Rory, has ADHD and has faced mental health challenges. Although Leech describes Jemma as the smartest person she knows, she grew up “watching my mum have to fight for my sister’s right to be in a classroom and to have people recognize that her intellectual capacities were not limited, just because her physical capacities might need some additional support,” Leech says. 

The confidence and perspective that’s grown from designing and engaging a project built from your deepest interests becomes a renewable resource that lasts a lifetime.

After her family moved from their native U.K. to Texas when Leech was 6, her mother became Jemma’s primary caregiver while her father managed international opera companies. From a young age, Leech developed independence and a strong sense of empathy. Meanwhile, Rory’s learning disability and struggles with mental health exposed her to the challenges of accessing educational support and medical care. 

Only at Rice did Leech, a political science and sociology major, begin to understand how significantly her siblings’ circumstances had affected her own upbringing. Her sophomore year, she took Disability and U.S. Law with associate professor of history Elizabeth Petrick. For the first time, she saw her family’s experience reflected in the course content and felt able to contribute because of her lived experience. She went on to take Sociology of Mental Health with Distinguished Professor of Sociology Tony N. Brown; Introduction to Disability Studies with Alan Russell, the executive director of the Disability Resource Center; and Family Seminar with professor of sociology Jenifer Bratter. She wrote her final paper for Family Seminar about the impact of disability on family members, a project that laid the groundwork for her Watson.

In her Watson application, Leech proposed an inquiry into how families reshape their households around disability, as well as the impact of external resources. “Looking back on my family’s experience, we were left to fight for my siblings’ needed accommodations on our own and were not given much, if any, external support,” she says. She drafted an itinerary that allocated half the year to relatively wealthy countries with a progressive approach to service provision (Sweden, Australia and New Zealand) and the other half to countries with fewer resources and services (South Africa and Uruguay). She spent hours Googling disability organizations and laws around the world, then sending cold emails to researchers and service providers, many of whom welcomed her to visit.

She added the Netherlands to her list because of another formative Rice experience: her close friendship with Roelfsema, who also had a sister with a disability. When Leech learned she’d been awarded Rice’s Watson Fellowship for 2023, Roelfsema made an offer: “You’re welcome to live with my family for a time to see what it’s like for a Dutch family with a child with a disability.”

Once there, Leech became close with Mijke’s older sister, who has a developmental disability and lives at home. She visited the restaurant where her friend’s sister worked — one that intentionally hires people with disabilities — and accompanied her to her accessible horseback riding session. The Roelfsemas introduced Leech to other families of children with disabilities, and Leech began asking her contacts the questions she would pose in interviews throughout her Watson year: What were your experiences growing up as a disabled person or family member of one? What have been your challenges or advantages as an adult, and what do you hope for your future? What supports have you received in these different phases of life?

After six weeks in the Netherlands, Leech moved on to Sweden, where she volunteered at a Stockholm-based advocacy group for people seeking supported living accommodations. Next came Australia, where she interviewed people with disabilities and their service providers about a decade-old overhaul of the country’s disability support system, widely viewed as failing to live up to its promises. 

In New Zealand, she spent most of her time drafting reports to help improve the lives of New Zealanders with disabilities, from preventing abuse in statutory care to bettering access to recreational activities. Leech also volunteered with a recreational access organization, piling into a minivan with participants and setting off for a day at the beach, at a farm or at a botanic garden — and decided to finish her Watson year with a similar hands-on experience. More Googling turned up a camp for children with serious illnesses and their family members in Ireland, and Leech applied for a volunteer summer camp counselor position.

When her plans in Uruguay fell through, she added a month in Vietnam, where she interviewed advocacy groups and staff at child care and rehabilitation centers. She also spent a day at the United Nations office in Hanoi, meeting with the team that implements the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Returning to her original itinerary, she traveled to South Africa to assist with research at Stellenbosch University outside Cape Town and volunteered at an inclusive preschool, where children with and without disabilities learn together. 

Finding strength in advocacy 

In mid-June, Leech’s flight from South Africa touched down at the airport in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. She’d added the country to her list because her good friend Stella Potemkin ’23 had a family connection to a nonprofit active in the small town of Mazabuka. That nonprofit contacted the local disabled persons organization, which agreed to help Leech conduct interviews.

Over the next week, she and her hosts bumped along dirt roads in a friend’s minivan, dodging goats and cattle until they arrived at straw or brick huts where families had agreed to talk with them. The homes typically weren’t large enough for her host’s wheelchair, so the group would sit outside in the sun on wooden stools or overturned fuel cans. With the help of an interpreter who spoke the local tribal language, Tonga, Leech asked her standard questions about family life and the role of support services.

She listened as religion entered the conversation: Families said their disability must have been God’s will, and they credited their Christian faith with helping them persevere. She met families who had albinism, which, in Zambia, carries a heavy stigma. “It demonstrated a form of disability that previously I would never have considered one,” she says.

Leech was inspired by the cooperatives that people with disabilities formed to support one another emotionally and financially. And she was struck by how basic the rural Zambians’ needs were. Her interviewees in developed countries typically mentioned a desire for caregiving staff, access to mainstream education or respite care. But in Zambia, her subjects longed for a wheelchair and some extra cash to help them survive.

“The Watson forces you to reckon with the concept of the geographic lottery,” Leech says, “and the idea that where you are born … fundamentally shapes not only who you become, but the quality of life that you are going to be entitled to.” In Sweden, she had been stunned at the government’s practice of paying for personal assistance for people with disabilities, whether those services were provided by professional caregivers or family members. She couldn’t help but wonder how her mother’s and sister’s lives would have been different if her own government had taken that approach.

But in Zambia, she saw children with disabilities who sat in the dirt all day simply because no wheelchair was available, or no school could serve them. Those moments underscored how Leech’s family had, in fact, won the geographic lottery: They had a wheelchair, a car and public education. 

Leech’s last stop was the camp for young people with serious illnesses or disabilities outside Dublin, where the lush green of County Kildare was a striking contrast to the parched Zambian plains. As a cara, the Irish word for friend, Leech supported her campers at the ropes course, made sure they got their medications and led evening reflections. She couldn’t help but imagine that Jemma would have enjoyed such an experience.

I think that my Watson has demonstrated that my personal connection to disability rights is not my vulnerability as an advocate, but my strength.

When the month ended, Leech said goodbye to her campers and flew back to the U.S. She and the other Watson Fellows convened for an intense five-day conference in Maine, where they presented their projects and began the curious process of readjusting to regular life. Leech’s next move is to apply to law school and pursue a career in disability law. 

“I really wanted to use my Watson to see whether working in a field that is so personal to me and my family was something that I could emotionally sustain,” she says. “I think that my Watson has demonstrated that my personal connection to disability rights is not my vulnerability as an advocate, but my strength. If I can spend the rest of my life fighting for families like mine, I will be proud of the life that I live.” 
 

Golden Tickets

Since 1971, young Rice alumni have pursued their passion projects abroad via the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Here are just a few examples. 

Apes and Conversation
Ilana Nyveen ’19 swung through 11 countries and four continents, observing great apes and working alongside sanctuaries in search of conservation strategies.

Survivor Empowerment
Jenny Wen ’13 talked to female survivors of sexual assault all around the world, curious about how each overcame their obstacles and regained confidence.

Running and Culture
Track star Becky Wade ’12 trained alongside some of the world’s fastest to discover the running culture in each of their nations, running 3,500 miles in 22 countries.

A Little Garden Music
Composer Caroline Shaw ’04 traveled Europe’s horticultural landscape and wrote movements for string quartets mirroring the architecture of the formal gardens she visited.

Endangered Parrots
Former Rice mascots’ owl-keeper Alice Chen ’91 deepened her aviary endeavors by studying endangered parrot species on St. Vincent Island and in Australia and Indonesia.

Immigrant Journeys
Filmmaker Mark Brice ’80 lived in Mexico and documented emigrants’ journeys to the U.S. as well as the cultural ramifications of living in America for those returning to Mexico. — Noa Berz ’26