Watson Fellowship Finalists Poised to Study Frogs, Book Towns
Ella Carlson ’25 and Ira Mukherjee ’25 vie for prestigious fellowship and transformative global experience
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series profiling Colby’s Watson Fellowship finalists.
A life-changing opportunity awaits four Colby seniors when, on March 14, they learn if they’ve won a prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.
If granted a Watson Fellowship, they’ll embark on a global journey to execute a personal project based on their deepest interests. A Watson fellowship could very well transform the arc of their young lives.
The fellowship is a one-year grant to pursue a personal project outside the United States. Available only to graduating seniors from select colleges, the fellowship encourages self-discovery, risk-taking, and independent exploration on a global scale.
Colby’s 2025 Watson finalists—Ella Carlson ’25, Ira Mukherjee ’25, Olchey Tchavyntchak ’25, and Gloria Zhang ’25—were selected by a committee of five faculty members from a pool of 10 applicants. The finalists compete nationally with candidates representing all 41 of the foundation’s partner colleges.
Only 40 national candidates will receive a Watson Fellowship and the $40,000 stipend that accompanies it.
“The Watson is an amazing opportunity to take everything you’ve learned as a student and in a classroom and transfer that to being a student in the real world,” said Carlson. She understands that as a Watson Fellow, she would not change the world, but rather change herself. “That’s such a beautiful thing,” she said.
Even if they’re not selected, all of the finalists said that identifying a project and putting together a proposal had value.
“The application process is worth it,” said Mukherjee. “There are so few opportunities at the end of your college career to sit back and take stock of everything that you’ve become and all of the ways that you’ve changed.”
Colby has participated in the program since 1971, winning 66 fellowships. For a complete list of former Colby Watson Fellows, their projects, and the countries they visited, click here.
Ella Carlson ’25
Watson project: Who Speaks for the Frogs?
Project countries: Germany, Indonesia, Australia, Brazil, Mexico
A fascination with frogs began early for Ella Carlson ’25. As a child in Jamestown, R.I., she explored vernal ponds and rolled over logs searching for tadpoles, adult frogs, and salamanders. That fascination developed into a deep concern for amphibians and now motivates her to work toward their conservation.
People worldwide share her passion, and the crux of her Watson project is to understand what motivates others toward conservation and how those motivations differ from culture to culture.
“I think motivation is unbelievably central to every type of progress we’re going to make preserving all types of species around our planet,” said Carlson. “I’m curious about learning what motivates other people and how we can use that information to implement strategies and actual conservation management plans in places with differing motivations.”
To frame her Watson project, Carlson developed a schema she calls the Four Cs. They are “organized from most to least human-centered: commercial gain, consumption, cultural significance, and genuine concern for the intrinsic value of a non-human species,” she said. She plans to “observe their interplay in the context of five challenging conservation scenarios.”
This includes in Germany, where the government funded the construction of 3,000 miles of tunnels under highways for safe amphibian migration. And in Java, Indonesia, where factories process frog legs—a delicacy in France—for commercial export. Also in Australia, where an app to record frog calls has sparked a crucial citizen science project.
Carlson will also spend time on the edges of Brazil’s rainforest to engage with Indigenous communities that view frogs as symbols of luck and prosperity. Her last stop will be Mexico to learn more about the axolotl, an endemic salamander revered in culture and mythology, featured on the country’s 50-peso bill, and consumed in traditional Aztec cuisine.
With so many diverse views of frogs and their conservation, Carlson plans to suspend judgment and have an open mind to what she observes. She’ll need to stay neutral like the scientist she has become at Colby. And yet she knows that being subjective is the only way to measure motivation.
“I think that what makes a good scientist is the ability to balance those two things,” she said. She’s learned at Colby that a liberal arts education fosters an “awareness that a deep involvement in the sciences can be congruent with a rich commitment to the humanities,” she said.
“Ella’s project stands out as both considered and compelling: its scope is ambitious but achievable,” said Professor of Art Véronique Plesch, chair of Colby’s Watson Selection Committee. “We find her project to be in full harmony with her personhood, her intellectual orientation, and her fascination with amphibians.”
Understanding frogs is critically important, Carlson emphasized, because they are keystone species and indicators of the overall health of ecosystems. Learning how people around the world work with amphibians will advance what she hopes are effective efforts to preserve them.
“I chose amphibians because I’m fascinated by them, and this is my life’s work,” she said. “They are everything I love about science captured in microcosm, and I think they’re crucially important to every type of science.”
Ira Mukherjee ’25
Watson project: Reading People & Places: Exploring Book Towns
Project countries: Scotland, India, Belgium, Japan
Ira Mukherjee ’25 would like to know what you’re reading.
A bibliophile from a young age, Mukherjee has always related to the world and people through books. This curiosity informs her Watson project to visit “book towns”—towns with unusually high concentrations of bookstores—and orbit in the literary universes of others.
The idea came after she read two books that took place in book towns, Days at the Morisaki Bookstore (set in Jimbocho, Tokyo) and Confessions of a Bookseller (set in Wigtown, Scotland).
“I was really struck in both cases by how the book towns and the books opened up the characters and people to the world,” said the senior from Acton, Mass. “Reading is often seen as a solitary activity, right? But I don’t think it is.”
Mukherjee believes our environments affect what and how we read, “in a web of space, people, and words.” She asks, “What is the space of a book town? What does it mean to read books in that place? And how does it affect how we interact with books and each other?”
She proposes to find out by spending time in two rural book towns and two urban ones. Her idea is to volunteer in bookstores to immerse herself in each community, talk to people who live in or visit them, and explore how the towns operate relative to tourism and commerce.
“Her concern is not just about books, but about human connections,” said Professor of Art Véronique Plesch, chair of Colby’s Watson Selection Committee. “Her reading of the social by way of the textual is timely and original. This is not only an exploration of local literary ecosystems, but also a personal yet critical inquiry into resilience in a globalized market.”
Surprisingly, Mukherjee discovered that book towns are not well explored or documented, even though they are formalized through the International Organisation of Book Towns. Mukherjee hopes her project will offer a deeper understanding of these unique communities.
The two rural book towns Mukherjee proposes to visit are Wigtown, Scotland, home to nearly 20 bookstores, and Redu in the French-speaking region of Belgium. In Redu, she can lean into her French-speaking skills and also experience a community publicly struggling with recent bookstore closures.
Her first urban book town is Kolkata, India, in an area that is more of a book district, near the University of Calcutta and Calcutta Medical College. Here, she’ll also attend the Kolkata Book Fair, or Boi Mela, the third-largest book fair in the world.
Her last stop will be Jimbocho, Tokyo, her project’s oldest and largest book town. Book stalls first appeared there in the late 1800s, and today the area has more than 150 bookstores and several publishing houses. She’s curious how Jimbocho has sustained itself for two centuries and about the nuances of its niches.
Mukherjee admits to feeling both excited and scared about the enormity of the Watson. “But I think it’s good that it scares me. If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a point in going.” She considers herself culturally adaptive having moved around as a child, and she knows that talking about books is a natural jumping-off point to start conversations.
“I have faith,” she said, “in my ability to generally find common ground with people.”
