Exploring the World Johnson Enhancement Funds Open Up Opportunities for W&L Johnson Scholars.

By Kelsey Goodwin
July 8, 2026

“It is a great pleasure to work with such talented students — to help advise and guide them and to connect them with opportunities to explore and hone their passions throughout their time at W&L and beyond.”

~ Elizabeth Knapp, director of the Johnson Program in Leadership and Integrity 

For Johnson Scholars at Washington and Lee University, the premier merit scholarship is about more than free tuition, room and board. Built into the award is an additional $10,000 for each scholar, known as Enhancement Funds, set aside specifically for experiences outside the classroom: summer internships, research projects, study abroad programs and more, with the express goal of removing financial barriers between a student and an opportunity that could define their academic and career path.

“The Enhancement Funds have really enabled me to go beyond the borders of Lexington,” says Carter Gleason ’27, a politics and environmental studies double major from St. Louis, Missouri. “They’ve let me participate in travel abroad that I would never have gotten to do, and they’ve helped me achieve a lot of pre-professional goals and prepare for a career. They enable you, as a student, to make the most of your education.”

Gleason used his funds across three separate experiences. During his sophomore year, he traveled to Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy, on a Spring Term Abroad program, teaching English and global citizenship to Italian middle schoolers. The following summer, Enhancement Funds covered his flights, housing, meals and everything else for six weeks at the University of Oxford through W&L’s Virginia Program at Oxford, where he studied history and literature through the tutorial system. His senior year, he used the remaining balance to cover living expenses during Washington Term, W&L’s six-week program in D.C. that pairs an internship — in Gleason’s case, at the National District Attorneys Association — with weekly coursework. With law school applications on the horizon this fall, this particular professional experience proved timely.

Each Johnson Scholar can draw on Enhancement Funds across their four years, using the $10,000 however their ambitions and experiences require. To request funds, students submit a budget and a description of their project or experience to Johnson Program Coordinator Haley Richard at least 10 business days before they need the money. Requests are approved by Director of the Johnson Program in Leadership and Integrity Elizabeth Knapp. Once approved, funds are deposited directly into the student’s account, and scholars can track their remaining balance along the way.

“It is a great pleasure to work with such talented students — to help advise and guide them and to connect them with opportunities to explore and hone their passions throughout their time at W&L and beyond,” Knapp says.

Some students choose to hold onto their funds, waiting for the moment the investment will make the most difference. That was Mia Remington ’28’s approach. A global politics and Chinese double major with a minor in poverty and human capability studies, Remington spent her first summer in an internship in Greensboro, North Carolina, through the Shepherd Program before deploying all of her Enhancement Funds this summer for W&L’s London Internship Program, an eight-week experience combining a three-day-a-week internship with coursework and weekend travel.

“It definitely could not have been possible without the funds,” said Remington, speaking from London, where she is currently working on the communications team at Ashton, a climate nonprofit under the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts. The organization’s flagship initiative, Let’s Go Zero, partners with schools on decarbonization, work that aligns with a Global Climate Change course Remington took at W&L the previous semester. Remington says that apart from the experience of living in London itself, the internship is providing her with substantive professional preparation through exposure to diverse colleagues and the hands-on experience of working for a small, high-impact nonprofit.

“I’m getting to dip my toes into many different things,” she says. “They’ve shown me the broad spectrum of everything that is going on within the organization right now.”

The range of what Enhancement Funds can support goes even further than international internships. Kat Repka ’26 — a double major in sociology and anthropology and art history, a Bonner Scholar and a recent graduate — used her funds to purchase camera equipment for a documentary project with Tampa Bay Watch, a Florida ocean conservation nonprofit. That work, which emerged directly from a Spring Term Abroad class on human rights and documentary filmmaking in Ghana, led her to film an interview with a local sculptor in Florida whose work uses recycled materials to depict Tampa Bay wildlife. She later used remaining funds for a solo art-access research trip through London, Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen, Denmark, experiences that fed directly into her art history capstone on French impressionist Suzanne Valadon. She also allocated funding for a spring break visit to Oslo and Bergen, Norway, where she took in the Edvard Munch Museum and the famous Oslo-Bergen train journey through the Norwegian fjords. Repka now works for the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty and says that the Johnson Program, as well as her overall W&L experience, allowed for an expansive education.

“I love being able to rave about the opportunities that students have to see beyond Lexington,” Repka says.

For Akash Abraham ’28, the Enhancement Funds opened a door into one of Washington’s specialized policy communities. With a longstanding interest in U.S.-India relations — his family is from India, and he grew up engaged with the politics of both countries — he used his funds for the Washington Term, where he interned at the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, a D.C.-based trade association working to deepen economic and diplomatic ties between the two nations. His work centered on tracing the legal and regulatory changes shaping cross-border investment, including how recent shifts in India’s regulatory environment are making it easier for U.S. companies to do business there. Beyond the research, the Washington Term’s network delivered invaluable opportunities to build relationships with alumni. Through associate professor of politics Brian Alexander’s cohort of W&L alumni in D.C., Abraham found himself at the State Department meeting an assistant secretary of state who is also a W&L alum. Now back home in Las Vegas studying for the LSAT and working remotely for the Hudson Institute, he’s set his sights on a career in trade compliance and U.S.-India regulatory work, a direction shaped directly by where his Enhancement Funds took him.

“To be a Johnson Scholar is just such a great honor,” he says, “but the Enhancement Funds part of it, which allowed for the pre-professional experience and networking, especially for such a small niche in Washington, that’s just extraordinarily helpful. I met people who worked at my organization who do research on U.S. and India relations, all the way to an assistant secretary of state who happened to be an alum [Riley Barnes ’09, who currently serves as deputy assistant secretary in the bureau of international organization affairs at the U.S. Department of State]. It’s those sorts of things that I’m super grateful the Enhancement Funds enabled me to do.”

For more information or to request Enhancement Funds, visit the Johnson Program page.

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