This year's president of Philips Brooks House, MacLeod says he lives in a tenement building next to Roosevelt Park, one of the three low-income housing projects that are part of the program.

His involvement with the project helps MacLeod to balance "what I found to be the cloistered and insular experience at Harvard," he said.

MacLeod spent his junior year in Nepal living with a Tibetan family, in a Buddhist monastery, and teaching English in Southern India in a Tibetan resettlement organization.

Social Studies concentrator Sewall spent her junior year and summer working in Washington, first as an intern on Capitol Hill and then at the Institute of Policy Studies.

She spent this past summer at the Center for Defense Information, where she helped organize a space arms control group that lobbied Congress for an end to the development of space weapons technology.

Sewall said it is important not to "let the space-based anti-ballistic missile defense genie out of the bottle."

Although Sewall said she is excited about her scholarship, she added, "I'm ambivalent about going away for two years because there is a lot of work to be done."

A varsity lacrosse player, Sewall is also confounder of a group that counsels women with eating disorders.

The rest of the scholars were not available for comment yesterday