The Weintal Scholar for the academic years 2017-2019 is Valentina Fuentes, a journalism graduate of Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile. She was at university during the 2011 student movement and student activist. For the past 3 years she has been a reporter first at Diario Financiero and at El Mercurio, where she has been their permanent correspondent at the National Congress. Other reporting experience includes a presidential trip to Peru and Mexico for the Iberian-American Summit and the Climate Change Summit as well as a reporter to the 70th session of the UNGA.

Her application further states "In the future, I want to continue my role as a journalist with great passion, but overall I want to take care of what is relatively weak in the Chilean mass media coverage: global news....I plan to work in the international section of a media outlet, hoping to influence the editorial line and assign higher priority to international news. I seek to be an opinion leader who can deeply analyze global events and offer coherent explanations about why news events happen."