Phillip Carter ’97

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Phillip Carter has a deep and abiding interest in the world around him and in public service. He is engaged and involved, deeply committed to playing a role in the development of the public institutions upon which we depend to guide our future.

Carter is the recipient, in what is an extremely stiff national competition, of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship, which funds a high-achieving student intent on a career in public service. He has been recognized as a UCLA Alumni Association Distinguished Scholar for academic and research excellence and for his contributions to the UCLA community.

At the Daily Bruin, Carter has worked his way from staff reporter to senior staff writer. He planned and executed the paper’s award-winning coverage of the July 1995 UC Regents’ decision to drop affirmative action in the UC system, which was also the subject of his honors thesis. He wrote the exclusive Daily Bruin coverage of Chancellor Charles Young’s resignation. He spent a year as wire editor, a job in which he managed the paper’s national and international reporting as well as its coverage of elections. Prior to his arrival at UCLA, Carter won a number of awards for his work on the Santa Monica College Corsair.

Carter spends considerable time organizing and running youth programs, including the post as lead advisor to the California YMCA Youth and Government Program, and he has been active as a YMCA resident camp director. He also gives numerous hours to both Heal the Bay and the Surfrider Foundation, participating in beach clean-up days and lobbying to improve the Los Angeles-area beaches.

Carter has been active in local and party politics, participating in local voter-registration drives, serving as a Riordan campaign worker for the Los Angeles mayoral election of 1993 and volunteering for the Presidential and Vice Presidential Advance Teams on their Los Angeles visits in 1992.

Carter has been designated by the military science department as a Distinguished Military Graduate of the Army ROTC. He has been selected for a commission in the Military Police Corp as a second lieutenant upon graduation; also selected for “immediate active duty,” the most prestigious type of commission for an Army officer. He plans to defer the graduate school aspect of his Truman Scholarship in order to accept his commission.