1996, Editor of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine; former editor of the Sports Group of Rodale Press

Course of Graduate Study for Dartmouth
General Fellowship

I would like to recommend Jonathan Kohl for the Dartmouth Fellowship. A more effective, if less orthodox, approach to this recommendation might be to simply send along a list of his accomplishments with a note saying they're all true. It is difficult to summarize all Jon has done without going on for pages.

I first met Jon during his freshman year, when he did a survey of the quality of student writing at Dartmouth. His project, I came to learn, was characteristic. His ventures combine originality, social critique, organization, and astonishing energy. Jon wasn't one of the resume-builders you meet at Dartmouth-the students who merely sample activities in order to take credit for as many as possible. He threw himself into everything he did. If he did more than most people, it was because he was capable of doing more, and because he was incapable of sitting still.

Jon wasn't just an environmental leader as a student; he defined, and redefined, Dartmouth environmental activism. He founded the College's first electronic magazine, headed up the student recycling program, and published many essays on the environment-including a cover story for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. (Authors of the previous two cover stories were a senior editor at Life and the national affairs editor of Newsweek. Students don't usually get to write our cover stories.)

Jon and I have kept in touch since he left Dartmouth. He worked with the Peace Corps in Costa Rica before enrolling at Yale Forestry, perhaps the nation's top school in land-management policy. His trajectory seems just about right for a career in international environmental policy. I hope you agree and help Jon with his next project.