Graduate scholarships

The Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Scholarship program was established in 1970 to commemorate Dan Sachs, an outstanding scholar and fine athlete who intended to enter public service. Sachs made his mark at Princeton as a leader of the football team and graduated with the highest academic honours. At Worcester College, he read history and shone in rugby, taking home a Blue in 1962. When he died of cancer at the age of 28, his friends and classmates instituted the scholarship to provide students with an opportunity to enlarge their experience of the world.

The center of gravity for the Scholarship in its formative years was Sachs’ mentor at Princeton, Professor Charles C. Gillispie, an eminent scholar and a founder of the modern discipline of the history of science. In the last months of Sachs’ life, Gillispie discussed with him the idea of a scholarship that would both send students from Princeton into the world and bring students to Princeton. Through the first half-century of its existence, the Sachs Scholarship program answered to the first part of this promise. When Professor Gillispie died at the age of 97 in 2015, he and his wife Emily bequeathed a substantial gift to the scholarship fund with the intention of fulfilling the second part of that promise.

As of 2019, there have been 57 Sachs Scholars. About three-quarters of these Scholars have elected to study at Worcester College, while the rest have pursued independent projects around the world. Sachs Scholars have gone on to lead a wide variety of careers in the arts, sciences, engineering, law, medicine, business, journalism, government service, and philanthropy. Together these Scholars now constitute the governing body of the Sachs Scholarship program. Representatives from the group gather regularly to select and welcome new Scholars into their diverse, cross-generational, and international community.

From 1970 to 2012, the program was limited to one scholarship per year. In 2013, the program began to offer two distinct scholarships to Princeton graduates every year: the Sachs Scholarship at Worcester, which provides Princeton graduates with two years of study at Worcester College; and the Sachs Global Scholarship, which allows Princeton graduates to pursue a one-year independent project of their own devising anywhere outside the United States. In 2016, a third scholarship was added to the program: the Daniel M. Sachs Scholarship at Princeton for Graduates of Worcester College. The first Sachs Scholar from Worcester College was selected in the Fall of 2016 for matriculation in the Fall of 2017.