Kansas State’s Clemente Jaquez-Herrera Receives Gilman International Scholarship To Study Abroad In Orvieto, Italy

“As an architecture student, Clemente Jaquez-Herrera has become familiar with Italy’s rich architectural past through the slides and photographs he’s seen in his classes at Kansas State University.

But Jaquez-Herrera, a senior from Garden City, is looking forward to touching architectural history when he studies in Orvieto, Italy, in the spring 2007 semester. Jaquez-Herrera is the recipient of a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, an honor worth up to $5,000 for study abroad. More than 1,100 students nationwide applied for as many as 400 scholarships.

“It’s very exciting to go where a lot of what we use in architecture nowadays was first being done,” Jaquez-Herrera said. “What people built back then is something I want to integrate into my own designs.”

Lynn Ewanow, associate dean of Kansas State’s College of Architecture, Planning and Design, has known Jaquez-Herrera since he was a freshman. She said the college’s program in Orvieto will allow him to strengthen his foundation in architecture and Western civilization through firsthand experience and give him the opportunity to broaden his perspective by meeting new people and experiencing a different culture.

Jaquez-Herrera said he looks forward to learning about the local culture as well as the architecture. Jaquez-Herrera speaks Spanish and English, which he learned as a young teenager and now is learning Italian. He wants to be prepared for opportunities to converse in Italian with native speakers.

Jaquez-Herrera also is excited to have more time to draw and sketch in ways that allow him to be expressive outside of his architecture studies at Kansas State. He plans to share his artwork with high school students he mentored as part of the Upward Bound program at Garden City Community College.

In an essay for the Gilman Scholarship, Jaquez-Herrera wrote that most of the Upward Bound students see the local community college as the farthest place away from home that they will study and how he hopes his own experiences will inspire them to dream big. He also described how coming to Kansas State to study was a big step for him as the first person in his family to go to college.

Jaquez-Herrera is meeting the academic demands placed on Kansas State architecture students while also becoming a campus leader. He has taken leadership roles in the Hispanic American Leadership Organization and Sigma Lambda Beta, a historically Latino fraternity where he led the effort to create the Sigma Lambda Beta Latino Immigrant Scholarship. He has been a multicultural ambassador for Kansas State, organized and spoke at an immigration reform rally and mentored Kansas City-area high school students through the Kauffman Scholars program. He also has earned membership into Mortar Board and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies.

He was a member of Kansas State’s Developing Scholars program, which promotes academic excellence and serves underrepresented students. As a senior, Jaquez-Herrera continues to work with the group by coordinating activities for the scholars. He also is active with various groups and activities within the college, whether it’s volunteering for a design charrette and construction project in New Orleans, serving on the dean’s advisory board and a department head search committee, or serving as president of Kansas State’s National Organization of Minority Architecture Students, which recently was named chapter of the year. He is the recipient of many awards and a participant in many community service activities.

Such widespread involvement while also focusing on academic excellence is remarkable, Ewanow said.

“Students in the college are expected to devote considerable time to their studies, so even for a gifted student it is a challenge to be engaged on a number of different levels in the university and maintain such a high level of academic standing,” she said.

Jaquez-Herrera’s contributions to Kansas State’s National Organization of Minority Architecture Students include participating in an award-winning design project for a film institute in San Francisco. Jaquez-Herrera said he aspires to one day design public structures like museums. He said another area he’d like to focus on is to influence the type of residential architecture accessible to most people by creating something meaningful beyond the need for shelter.

“One aspect of architecture I’d like to focus on is to help the common people,” he said.

The Gilman International Scholarship is a congressionally funded program offered through the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State and is administered by the Institute of International Education. One purpose of the Gilman Program is to encourage participation by students in a broad range of fields of study, including those not traditionally represented in study abroad.”

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