Eighteen UChicago graduate students from the Booth School of Business, Crown Family School of Social Work, and Harris School of Public Policy were introduced on September 15 as the new cohort of Obama Foundation Scholars for the 2026–27 academic year. 

The Obama Foundation works in collaboration with graduate programs at the University to support students in their final year of study to bring a social project to fruition. To do this, the program grants the scholars $10,000 to subsidize tuition and living expenses.

Cohorts are typically composed of students “who have already shown a real commitment to tackling difficult social challenges, whether here in Chicago or elsewhere in the world,” Program Director Adrian Talbott told the Maroon.

“What we try to do is give [students] opportunities to step outside their own disciplines and think about some of the bigger questions of leadership,” Talbott said. 

Scholars are required to attend biweekly online conferences with their cohort. The Obama Foundation also hosts a networking workshop at one of the graduate schools every other week, where participants are introduced to global leaders, policymakers, civil rights advocates, as well as University and Foundation alumni and faculty. 

Once a quarter, the program puts on a civic trek, which provides students the opportunity to gain practical experience and hear from civic leaders across Chicago. Students are also able to meet with Institute of Politics Pritzker Fellows, a selected cohort of domestic and international figures who facilitate seminars that address pressing global issues, at the IOP each quarter. 

Two of this year’s Obama Foundation Scholars, Juliet Rowe and Erica Choi, sat down with the Maroon to speak about their experience with the program.

Juliet Rowe

Rowe is a final-year graduate student in the Crown School who works as the Director of Development at OneGoal, a Chicago-based non-profit organization that partners with local high schools to provide students mentorship as they apply to higher education and begin their first year. 

In the program, she aims to build upon the skills she already has and further expand her network, bringing various sectors together in order to close the opportunity gap for students in underserved communities. Her social project centers on “uplifting early career opportunities for young people and cross-sector collaboration,” she told the Maroon.

According to Rowe, the program’s intersocial structure allows for more cross-sector collaboration. “It’s just really interesting seeing [the other scholars’] perspectives on things, like having that business hat, the policy hat, and you also form these brain trusts [with] people in your cohort who are doing similar work to you, [whom] you meet every few weeks to talk about challenges and build each other up,” Rowe said. 

In the second phase of the program, which aims to shape each scholars’ social project into its final form, scholars are introduced to a system-mapping methodology, encouraging them to leverage the different types of connections they’ve gained to further their project. “I have a lot of these relationships, but how do I map them? How do I bring people together to enact change, especially educational change?” Rowe said.

As she looks toward the next step in her career, Rowe said she clearly sees the value of having attained a master’s degree at the Crown School. She said that the experience with the Obama Scholars program has been “absolutely amazing.” 

Erica Choi

Choi began her dual M.B.A. at the Booth School and M.P.P. at the Harris School after recognizing the need to understand the levels of intersectionality impacting her work. Choi plans to implement her master’s education in her most recent work: Fabric Health, a digital healthcare platform that assists eligible individuals to qualify for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid benefits. Her project works to find the best method to reach the most amount of people eligible for benefits. 

“I really can’t emphasize the network enough,” Choi said. Similar to Rowe, Choi says the cross-sector collaboration facilitated by the Obama Foundation Scholars program has helped her become a more well-rounded individual, which improves the scope of her social project.

“The nice thing about the Obama Scholars Program is it makes you really confront the challenges head on,” Choi said. In her earlier projects working at philanthropy nonprofits, Choi said she identified a disconnect between boots-on-the-ground social work and the priorities of organization administrators. Together with her formal education at the University, Choi sees her expanding skill set in policy analysis and unit economics along with stakeholder alignment helping her tackle these inconsistencies in her future work. 

Echoing what the scholars had to say regarding intersectional collaboration, Talbott said that “one of the most valuable things about the program is what the scholars learn from each other. You have people coming from very different backgrounds, working on very different problems, who discover that they have a great deal to teach one another about leadership and how change actually happens.” 

“Our hope is that they leave the University not only with a degree and stronger professional skills, but also with new relationships, a broader understanding of the world, and a clearer sense of how they want to make a difference,” he added.