The University of Minnesota College of Design scholarship committee has chosen Ben Dose to be the SPQR Fellow for 2014. Ben is from New Ulm, MN where he graduated high school from Minnesota Valley Lutheran. Ben wrote “my father teaches college Literature and my mother was a medical transcriptionist.” Ben will be one of twenty students in the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture Spring Semester Study Abroad to Rome and Istanbul. Click on the “Follow” button at the bottom of their page and you can be notified of every post by email. Signup and comment.
This is from Ben’s acceptance email:
“First of all, I want to thank everyone involved with the Fellowship for creating and maintaining it! Study abroad is no light undertaking financially, and I’m immensely grateful and honored to have been selected! I’m also really looking forward to the additional insight I’ll get by crafting blog posts and studying the Parthenon–from the sound of things, Ozayr will be working us pretty hard and it would have been difficult to find time for adventures outside of our coursework.
I’ve never been to Rome before, or even outside the country, so I’m hoping to see as much as I absolutely can! Many of my studiomates are in the same boat, so several of us are planning to spend a few days in Switzerland before arriving in Rome. Hopefully we’ll be able to do more than just sleep off jet lag. Until then, I’m at home with family, spending time with old friends, and working a few jobs to further defray travel costs. I’ve also been working on designing a wine label for my parents–we’ve got a small family vineyard on our property just outside of New Ulm, MN.
I graduated in 2011 from Minnesota Valley Lutheran, a small private high school just outside of town. Unfortunately the school’s small size meant that there weren’t a lot of design-oriented courses I could take early on, so I had very little foreknowledge of anything architecture- or design-related before coming to the U.”
