Joel Dabu and Kevin Setter don’t have a whole lot in common – both are college seniors, and both have some links to Arlington.
But last week, Dabu and Setter became the two Arlingtonians in a select group of scholars, as the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation awarded its first scholarship awards, $50,000 apiece, good for six years.
It’s a disparate group – all college seniors, but ranging in age from 20 to 51, at colleges around the country, with plans to become fighter pilots, journalists, musicians, physicists and city planners.
"It’s amazing how many doors this opens," Dabu said. "It’s such a large group of scholars, and the [foundation] board is so distinguished. It opens a lot of connections."
Dabu, 21, a senior at George Washington University, and Setter, 22, soon graduating from Swarthmore College, both said they were ecstatic about their scholarships. "It’ll make my life much easier," Setter said, "and give me the freedom to do things otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to do."
Dabu said he was still reeling from the news. "It hasn’t rally hit me yet," he said. "This is one of those life changing events. I’ll say, ‘That’s when things really happened for me.’"
DABU, A COURTHOUSE RESIDENT, grew up in Virginia Beach, moving to the DC area to attend Catholic University.
"I initially thought I would do architecture," he said "But that didn’t fit, so I transferred to GW, to the urban studies program."
He has always been fascinated by cities, he said, by their layout and structure, drawing maps of imaginary cities as a child before computer simulations of cities were available.
"I thought it was really cool the way everything was planned," Dabu said. "I remember distinctly getting a map, and drawing two rivers that intersect, like the Potomac and the Anacostia, and then putting streets running off of them."
As he went through college, however, Dabu also gained an appreciation of the way cities grow, expanding in a mess of streets beyond a planned grid. But he also began to look at urban planning as it works from the ground up, rather than being imposed on a city from top government.
Part of that awakening came from Dabu’s work at Clarendon Alliance, where he has served as webmaster and administrative assistant for more than a year – a position he happened on by accident.
"I moved to Courthouse in 2000, and I was jogging by when I saw the Alliance office," he said. "I thought I’d like to intern, to do planning – they had a model of Clarendon in the window."
Dabu got experience at urban planning, working within zoning and municipal laws to run Alliance events like the weekly farmers’ market, or last year Clarendon Day. But he also got a feel for the personal element of urban planning.
"You meet people, interact, spontaneous conversations happen," Dabu said. "There are routines, and you always meet people. So the neighborhood seems more cohesive."
Last year’s Clarendon Day was Dabu’s trial by fire, working with both county regulations and with people Jon Kinney said. "We usually have about 10,000 people, over 100 vendors, and all sorts of problems," said Kinney, Clarendon Alliance president.
One week before the event, executive director Tom Fairchild’s father died, and Fairchild had to leave town. Dabu stepped in, and proved to be a natural for making things work. "He’s 21, and there are a lot of 40- or 50-year-olds who would have been stymied," Kinney said. "It was extremely impressive. He was not panicky, he was not afraid."
That is why, Kinney said, he was happy to write one of Dabu’s recommendations for the Cooke scholarship, even though it meant losing a valuable Alliance member.
Dabu faces the enviable choice of deciding what to do with his newfound freedom – whether to work on his master’s degree in urban planning at New York University or the London School of Economics.
But that’s not the limit of his ambition. "I don’t have to just get a master’s degree, I can go to law school, or get a Ph.D.," he said.
When he gets done, Dabu doesn’t think he’ll become an urban planner – not quite. "I would say more of a community developer than an urban planner," he said.
SETTER, LIKE DABU, faces a tough choice with the award of the Cooke scholarship. "He also got a Fulbright scholarship, and he’s trying to figure out how to make both work," said his father, Kenneth Setter. "It’s an embarrassment of riches."
Kevin Setter grew up in Arlington, graduating in 1998 from the H-B Woodlawn Alternative Program before heading to Swarthmore.
Woodlawn was "a really positive experience," he said. "It’s a free-flowing educational philosophy that was good for me. It allowed me to pursue all the things I was interested in."
There were quite a few. Setter graduates this month with a bachelor’s degree in both math and physics, while maintaining an avid personal interest in music, especially in the piano.
But all three disciplines, math, music and physics, are related. "Math and physics… you need a lot of one to do the other. Music is like math in a way," he said. "They both involve a very finely developed sense of esthetics. It’s all about communicating ideas in an elegant way."
Setter’s work in physics led him to string theory, a unifying concept that he found very attractive. "I’m interested in the fundamental nature of things, finding out what’s at the very base of our knowledge," he said. "That really interests me."
Such interests have a root in his family. "I was always interested in physics as a hobby," Kenneth Setter said. "So we always talked about physics, until he outpaced me." Such discussions were not just one-sided.
"My dad was a Catholic priest," Kevin Setter said. "He retains an interest in the larger questions about the universe. Religion and physics, I think, are very closely related."
Setter planned to use his Cooke scholarship to continue work in string theory at the California Institute of Technology. But the Fulbright scholarship offered the opportunity to spend a year at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Canada.
"It’s brand new, founded by a couple of Canadian entrepreneurs, and devoted to the study of fundamental physics," Setter said. "One of the first things they’re going to do is loop quantum gravity, which I wrote a paper on."
He has to work out the details with the Cooke Foundation, but hopes to spend a year in Canada before moving on to California. "I thought it would be good, to go do research with the big names in the field," he said. "It would be a neat thing to do for a year."
Both scholarships were a great honor, he said, and his father agreed. "We’re just tickled that it’s come about," Kenneth Setter said.