She hopes to help out Haiti

Shaina Saint-Lot, a senior studying international studies and economics, will get her master’s degree at the prestigious University of Cambridge in England, thanks to a competitive scholarship funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She was one of 40 scholars picked this year, and she’s the first Lobo to get the award.

“I think it’s gonna be a really great opportunity to pretty much discover what I really want to do,” Saint-Lot said.

But Saint-Lot already has an idea of what that might be.

A monthlong UNM course in Nicaragua that included tours of orphanages, non-governmental organizations and even a town that was completely cut off from the rest of the country exposed her to how a government helps — or doesn’t help — its people. That, along with having grown up in Port-au-Prince, inspired Saint-Lot to examine and study the effective and ineffective ways of community organizing.

She hopes to one day return to Haiti, which she and her family left when she was 13, and “help the people who pretty much raised me,” Saint-Lot said.

“I want to work on community development and look at a grass roots approach to see how effective that is,” she said.

Saint-Lot will major in development studies at Cambridge in the fall.