Schuyler, Author at Fulbright Student Program Blog

Taekwondo and More in Jordan

August 22, 2016

Hannah Rosenberg Jones, 2014-2015, Fulbright English Teaching Assistant to Jordan (left, front row, in red shirt), with her dojang partners at the Al Faris Taekwando Center in Amman, Jordan

When I first moved to Amman, Jordan as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant, I sought experiences that would take me away from the comfort of my expat community. Having participated in athletics my entire life, I chose to pick up taekwondo at a dojang near the University of Jordan, where I taught. Located in the basement of a popular hookah café, I remember feeling nervous that I was about to descend into a room full of only men. To my pleasant surprise, the hole-in-the-wall taekwondo club that I had chosen happened to also host a number of top female athletes.

During my day-to-day activities in Amman, I was confronted by numerous obstacles. Communicating in Arabic was difficult, navigating public transportation was tricky, and teaching a classroom of 60 students was a new challenge. In the evenings, I was a 30-year-old taekwondo beginner who spoke awkward textbook Arabic going up against black-belt, adolescent Olympic hopefuls who spoke Arabic a mile a minute.

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Enrichment Foreign Fulbright Fulbright-Millennial Trains Project

A Millennial Challenge for Advocacy

August 19, 2016

Christian Mpody, 2015-2017, Togo, departing for Los Angeles on the “Unity” leg of this year’s Millennial Train Project

My Fulbright journey in the United States has been a huge revelation to me concerning some topics that I would have never thought about before I started my grant. One of them is the constant struggle between social and market justice, in a context in which the notion of individualism is beloved by constituents across the nation. Related to that struggle is an issue that I’ve become particularly interested in: the crisis of gun violence in America. In learning about the crisis during my Fulbright grant, I’ve heard debates about whether only individuals should be blamed for gun violence, or if the gun industry and the government should be blamed instead. It appears to me that the answer to the issue lies more in value judgments and advocacy than in scientific evidence. In other words, epidemiological evidence has not been the absolute foundation upon which changes have been implemented. When I write that, I remember a mentor who once said, “science pursues truth whereas practice pursues values.”

When I learned about this year’s Millennial Trains Project (MTP), I felt it would be a unique opportunity for me to gain some trans-regional perspectives on gun violence prevention. My MTP project objective is to challenge Millennials to engage in gun violence prevention advocacy–and any other “changes” that go towards the “shared values” held by a community. I do not want to speculate about the extent to which evidence-based practice has become “hypothetical.”

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Enrichment Foreign Fulbright Fulbright-Millennial Trains Project

Expect the Unexpected

August 18, 2016

View from the “Unity” Millennial Train on the way into Denver, Colorado (photo courtesy of Laura Jimenez Morales)

When I first heard about the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), I knew right away that I wanted to apply, but did not have a specific project in mind. One of the MTP requirements was to develop a project that linked five different cities (in my case, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee and Detroit) together. Because I am doing my PhD in Mass Communications and Media Studies on my Fulbright grant, and my research focuses on Spanish speaking media in the United States, I wanted to find a way to bring these two things together. I figured that all of the cities on the second MTP journey, Unity, had a significant Hispanic population, so I decided to work with that. Having recently become interested in the subject of millennials and their declining interest in broadcast television in Mexico, I realized that this was an issue which could be looked at from a different perspective and applied to the current situation in the United States. In order to be able to better analyze this issue, I proposed to do a series of surveys of Hispanic millennials. In these surveys, I asked questions about their television viewing habits and preferences. I wanted to see if Hispanic millennials in the United States were interested in watching television in Spanish, and what the reasons behind that may be.

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U.S. Fulbright

Learning Side-by-Side

August 17, 2016

Joseph Todd La Torre, 2015-2016 Fulbright ETA to Nepal, teaching with his co-teacher, Ms. Maiya

My interest in culture and religious studies began during my early years of high school when I started exploring Eastern philosophies. Determined to find answers to my many questions, I went on to study psychology and religious studies in college. Once there, one of my favorite experiences took place in the spring of 2014, when I helped organize my campus’s first Holi celebration. Exposing students to traditional South Asian culture while having an overall great time, made it a huge success. Later that year, Professor Meetu Khosla from University of Delhi, a cultural psychologist on a Fulbright-Nehru grant in the United States, gave a lecture at my school. Fascinated by her research, it was at that moment that I decided to go to South Asia. Knowing Nepal as Siddhartha Gautama’s birthplace inspired me to begin here.

When I applied to be a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Nepal, I didn’t know what to expect. I wasn’t entirely sure about what my assignments would entail, but I was eager to live in Nepal. The eagerness was twofold: I was ready to feel my way around a proper classroom and was also excited to immerse myself in the country’s religious communities.

By early March, I had arrived. In hindsight, the first month in Nepal was a particularly special time for me. During this time, I was adjusting to my routine, and everything felt new. It also coincided with some of the most important religious holidays of the year in the region: Shivaratri (the Day of Lord Shiva), Holi (The Spring Festival of Color), and Nepali New Year.

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U.S. Fulbright

Don’t Play the Game. The Odds Are Not in Your Favor!

August 15, 2016

Mary Ogunrinde, 2014-2015, Fulbright English Teaching Assistant to the Dominican Republic, in the classroom

Don’t play the game. The odds are not in your favor. I say this because I began and completed my application for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship during the last three weeks of the 2013 application cycle. I applied to teach in the Dominican Republic. I wasn’t trying to start the process so late. I started graduate school in August of that year and learned about the Fulbright U.S. Student Program as I was looking for scholarships on the Internet. I spent the first month of graduate school looking for a Fulbright Program Adviser on my campus and it turned out there wasn’t one. By this time, it was already September and the application was due by the second week of October.

As I worked on my Statement of Grant Purpose and Personal Statement, I scoured the Internet for information about previous Fulbrighters, their experiences, their essays, their credentials, et cetera. That’s when I began to play the game: The comparison game. I began to lose some of confidence in my ability to prove to Fulbright application reviewers that I was worthy of a grant. These Fulbrighters had pages of credentials. They seemed to be on their way to winning a Nobel Prize. Here I was a first semester graduate student with a resume that contained mostly volunteer work from my undergrad and no leadership position in any organization. I didn’t graduate Summa Cum Laude. I was not saving the lives of orphans in Africa or building wells in India. I was sitting in St. Petersburg, Florida, trying not to get lost, make wrong turns on to the numerous one-way streets and get myself killed in an accident.

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Enrichment Foreign Fulbright Fulbright-Millennial Trains Project

An Inner and Outer Journey

August 10, 2016

Desiree Barao Garcia, 2015-2017, Germany (right), on the “Change” leg of the 2016 Millennial Train Project journey

I want you to think about this statement: “Amazon is just a start-up, they have a long way to go.”

Do you agree with it? Well, I don’t. Yet this is exactly Amazon’s understanding of themselves. They state that their revenue currently only accounts for 1% of the world’s retail volume, i.e., they have big goals of taking over the world and are just beginning to do so. And, they are not the only ones. For years now, big companies and larger businesses have been taking over entire industries causing a power imbalance that eventually benefits very few shareholders while, in my opinion, disadvantaging employees and customers, often harming families, and communities as a whole.

From a customer perspective, larger companies eventually gaining the power of monopolies or duopolies will raise prices beyond what may be affordable for the average person. Enabled to set prices, they will choose profit maximizing prices rather than watching out for customers who may not have sufficient financial ability to pay. And while this situation currently applies mostly to luxury goods, knowing that the greater part of the retail industry is being taken over by large companies, I fear that this will – in the future – also be the case for basic suppliers.

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