While most seniors aim to stay afloat next year, one student is ready to take a plunge. Max Goldstein '09 was one of 40 graduating college seniors nationwide named to receive a Watson Fellowship for 2009-2010. Announced March 15, the grant provides graduating college seniors the opportunity and means to pursue an independent project of their design outside of the U.S. for the 12 months beginning on August 1 of this year.
For his project, Goldstein will seek to foster ties between separate nations or geographies by swimming across waterways that physically divide separate cultures or nations. He aims to make each of his long-distance swims a community-oriented effort by offering swim lessons in a number of different countries and engaging with foreign aquatic communities. His current plan includes swims through the Strait of Gibraltar between Morocco and Spain, Lake Titicaca from Peru to the Island of the Sun in Bolivia, and the Dardanelles and Bosphorus Straits between European and Asian sections of Turkey.
Although the planned swims vary in distance from 12 to 22 kilometers, Goldstein said that part of the challenge of each sojourn will be to complete the entire swim without touching any land or buoyant objects until he reaches his destination.
A swimmer since he was 18 months old, he said, "I'm just as much scared by the physical and mental challenges as I am excited to confront them."
For Bowdoin students, the application process for Watson Fellowships began in September when students submitted project proposals and personal statements to the Student Fellowships and Research Office. Four proposals were passed on to the national pool of applications, from which 40 national proposals were chosen as recipients of the fellowship and a stipend funding travels throughout the world for independent purposes.
Goldstein first heard about possibilities offered by the Watson Fellowship in his first year of college. When he found out that he had been awarded the grant, he said: "I was in a kind of disbelief when I got it because, I thought, the sweet dream I had may actually come to life... My proposal had me imagining anything I would like to do and like to be and got me thinking that there are no limitations. I'm now coming into a reality of responsibility and opportunity."
Goldstein has already begun preparations for the first leg of the trip along the Spanish coast by getting in touch with local university swim teams, open-water swimming associations, and hospital groups that use swimming as a form of patient rehabilitation. He plans to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in mid-October in what he expects to be his most linguistically-rewarding experience among international cultures because he will be able to apply his knowledge of French, Spanish, and Arabic languages during that part of the trip.
From there, Goldstein will proceed to Peru, where he plans to swim across Lake Titicaca to Bolivia by March of next year. He will then consider returning to Morocco to swim up to Spain once more to more directly engage members of the African community the second time he crosses the gap between the Atlantic and Mediterranean. In June and July, he plans to swim twice between the Asian and European shores of Turkey, first to Europe across the Dardanelles Strait near Istanbul and then back to Asia across the Bosphorus farther north.
For each of his proposed swims, Goldstein will be accompanied by a support boat that will carry his personal possessions and will wait for him at each of his various destinations to help him out of the water; he considers such logistical components of the journey conducive to the ideals of the group togetherness he seeks to foster among different peoples.
Having recently finished his fourth season competing with the Bowdoin Men's Swim Team, Goldstein is now training on his own in the pool at Bowdoin and is trying to put on weight so that he will not have to wear an entire wetsuit when swimming from Spain to Morocco. This coming summer, he plans to work as an ocean lifeguard with the Los Angeles County Fire Department and will be able to practice a few long-distance swims in the ocean while there. On July 31, Goldstein plans to show up at work on the beach with his travel-ready backpack in hand so he can depart for his trip at the end of the day.