This year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation named three Rutgers students recipients of the competitive and prestigious Gates Foundation Scholarship. Michael Hayoun, Suzanne Pilaar, and Brian Spatocco will spend one year at Cambridge University in England pursuing master of philosophy degrees. These three stars won’t stop there, however: They are already planning their academic lives after Cambridge and plotting how they will leave their mark on the world.

Instrumental to these students' success was the assistance of Arthur Casciato and the Office of External Fellowships and Postgraduate Guidance at Rutgers. Established as part of sweeping reforms made to undergraduate education in New Brunswick, the office helps students from Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick with the application process for major national fellowships – like Gates, Fulbright, Rhodes, and Marshall scholarships – and competitive postgraduate support. "Art is a man who knows more about scholarships and fellowships than any I've ever met," Spatocco said.

"Our job is to identity Rutgers' top students – students who are not only academically strong but also exhibit leadership qualities and have a breadth of unique experiences throughout their college careers," said Casciato, director of the fellowship office. "Michael, Suzanne, and Brian really represent the best that a top university like Rutgers produces."

All students are encouraged to take advantage of the resources of this office and learn about these competitive fellowships early in their college careers, and faculty members may recommend promising students at any stage in their college careers with strong academic records and breadth of experience to this office.

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Volunteer firefighter and EMT seeks health and wealth

Throughout college, Michael Hayoun had no doubt he wanted to be a physician. “I can identify with patients. I’ve been in the hospital. I used to hate doctors,” Hayoun says.

Since childhood, Hayoun has struggled with severe allergies to an array of foods – from fruits to nuts to dairy – and asthma still leaves him periodically hospitalized. That hasn’t stopped him from becoming an emergency medical technician, working as a volunteer firefighter, earning a black belt in karate, winning several figure skating championships, leading 12 students on a medical relief trip in Peru, and conducting research in psychology and neuroscience.

“I get about four to six hours of sleep a night,” Hayoun says.

He wishes he’d had time to study abroad as an undergraduate. Now he will be studying toward his master’s degree in bioscience enterprise in England.

Hayoun, a 22-year-old from Margate, New Jersey, is the son of a businessman. His mother works in medical billing. “My father told me, ‘Mike, when you go to college you’re taking business school courses.’ I said, ‘No, I’m taking science.’ Now is my opportunity to get some business experience for my field.”

At Rutgers, Hayoun chose a major in cell biology and neuroscience – what he thought was the “coolest” major for a premed student. His research endeavors have led him to study memory and learning in the hippocampus with Professor of Psychology Tim Otto, and the molecular biology of schizophrenia at Wyeth in Princeton.

He is interviewing with several medical schools and plans to pursue a dual M.D./Ph.D. degree when he is finished his program at Cambridge. Training to be a doctor is his calling, but medical school, Hayoun says, “doesn’t teach you the business side of things – how to get a patent, how to run a lab, how to network.”

By the time he finishes his residency, Hayoun will be 35. “Then I’ve got two choices: either go into academic medicine or I go into industry,” he said. “I can see myself as a professor in a medical school and moving up into a dean’s position.”

His busy life at Rutgers taught Hayoun the importance of balance. During his sophomore year, he attempted taking 20 credits, studying for the MCAT, and serving on four executive boards. Hayoun was already stretched thin when his friend and fellow volunteer firefighter, Kevin Apuzzio, died in a blaze. “It was all just too much, and with Kevin dying, that was just it,” he says.

Remarkably, the ambitious Hayoun still finds time for grounding moments. “I’ve always wondered: What’s my purpose? How should I prove my existence? Why should I be around? I have passion and excitement for everything that I do,” he says. “If it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing.”

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She can dig it: looking into the environments of our ancestors

Suzanne Pilaar was in grade school when her family took a trip to Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown in Virginia. The historical attraction offered mystery and discovery for her young mind.

“I want to go to college and come back and dig here,” she told her father.

“I sort of forgot about that, but while I was in college I found out they do have a field school there to learn how to excavate,” Pilaar says today. “I got to go there in the summer of 2006. It was sort of serendipitous.”

Pilaar will go to Cambridge to work toward a master’s degree in archaeological sciences. “[Archaeology] is very much like a mystery,” she says. “You are trying to reconstruct from so little and imagine the past. And the adventure aspect of it definitely always appealed to me” Pilaar, who grew up in Haledon, New Jersey, is an enthusiastic camper and kayaker.

Pilaar started her education at Rutgers in the Cook College Honors Program. She maintained an interest in archaeology but was attracted to environmental and ecological studies. Instead of choosing just one area, Pilaar sat with late Professor Barbara Goff and devised her own major – paleoecology – plotting out her entire college career around her passions. She also is an evolutionary anthropology major.

“My ultimate career goal is to become a professor at a research university like Rutgers,” Pilaar says. She credits Rutgers with giving her access to formidable scholars and the proximity to do an internship at the Museum of Natural History in New York as well as to visit her tight-knit family in north Jersey frequently. “I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I went to school somewhere else.”

She spent three weeks in Mexico investigating archaeological tourism, and worked at the Smithsonian Institute last summer, which provided her with the connections to spend eight weeks doing excavation in Turkey this summer. “The site is only about 4,000 years old,” Pilaar said. “We’ll be looking at animal bones and trying to understand how people used animals in their daily lives.”

Pilaar found time to tutor at the Douglass Writing Center and coordinate student programming as a member of the residence life staff. She also headed up the Anthropology Club.

“One of the things I love about archaeology is that it’s very interdisciplinary,” Pilaar says. “You can get really scientific and quantitative but you also can extrapolate and do some cultural musing. ... I think everyone has an interest in the human past and who we are.”

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Student of microtechnology always seeks the big picture

Brian Spatocco grew up in a homogeneous town in South Jersey and wanted to push the boundaries of his comfort zone. He had no idea when he applied to study abroad in South Korea how far they would be stretched.

“I get the paperwork, and it says I am going to Ewha Womans University,” said Spatocco, who will pursue a Master of Philosophy in micro- and nanotechnology at Cambridge. “I applied to a woman’s university. I called and said ‘I’m not a woman.’ They said it’s OK.”

Spatocco spent a semester studying the Korean language and women’s and gender studies at Ewha, one of only 24 men in a student body of 20,000. He started a tutoring service for Koreans who want to learn English and still maintains contacts in the country – from business travelers to students studying abroad – to oversee its development.

His enterprising nature is just a glimpse of what is to come from Spatocco. He possesses the practical and methodical nature of an engineer, as well as the interpersonal and social capital required to get innovations up and running. The emerging field of nanotechnology seems a perfect fit.

“I may work for a venture capital firm. There is a lot of opportunity that’s going to happen in five years, which is when I’m getting out of school,” Spatocco says with a smile. He will pursue his Ph.D. at either Harvard or Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Originally from Sewell, New Jersey, the 22-year-old Spatocco rattles off what he calls “all the buzzwords” – materials science, nanotechnology, self-assembly – when he talks about his occupational ambitions. But his work as a member and president of the Engineering Governing Council and experience lobbying Trenton for the interests of engineering and science students as well as students at-large back up the buzz with substance.

He sits on the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority’s Student Advisory Committee and speaks passionately about affordable education. He came to Rutgers with the help of the Outstanding Scholar Recruitment Program. And the tutoring service he launched in Korea targets students of modest means who don’t have money for expensive and elite English-language tutoring.

Spatocco’s trip to Korea is where he realized he has the ability to identify gaps separating groups of people and come up with ideas to fill that niche. “These are the skill sets that help understand what’s technically going on and allow us to look at the industry and economy and say we have a void to fill,” he says. “I kind of see this as my future.”