Today is Earth Day! We invite all current and past Fulbrighters to share their stories about how they are helping to improve the environment locally – in their home and host communities – and globally. How are you spending Earth Day 2015? Let us know!
Fulbright Foreign Students participating in the Potomac Watershed Cleanup as part of the 2015 Fulbright Enrichment Seminar in Washington, DC for first-year, non-U.S. grantees
Today is Senator J. William Fulbright’s 110th Birthday!
In the spirit of promoting mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries, we encourage all Fulbrighters worldwide, past and present, to engage with your local home or host communities. To learn more about the history of the program, and Senator J. William Fulbright’s legacy, check out the video below.
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Cristian Mogrovejo, 2004-2006, Ecuador (left), and Rodrigo Muñoz receiving funding for the Stories of Imprisoned Women project from the U.S. Embassy in Ecuador
It has been almost a decade since I completed my Master of Fine Arts in Industrial Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology as a Fulbright Student from Ecuador, but the lessons I learned from that time are still professionally and personally valuable to me to this day. Ever since that life-changing experience, I have become increasingly aware of my responsibility to society and to efforts to promote positive change. One way in which I have been able to promote change at home, is as a design instructor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where I encourage students to think about their work in terms of ideas and solutions to current social issues.
One day, one of my former students, Rodrigo Muñoz (currently pursuing an MFA in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts in New York City), a colleague and good friend, shared his idea about working together to help address the issue of the living conditions of imprisoned Ecuadorian women. From that day forward, our project was born; we called it: Stories of Imprisoned Women: Literature and Art as Exercises in Empowerment, Rights and Identity.
Ammar Mohammed is a current Fulbright Foreign Student from Yemen
In the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we are re-posting an article from Fulbright Foreign Student and 2014 Fulbright-Millennial Trains participant from Yemen Ammar Mohammed, whose research in sustainable development focuses on promoting the leadership and entrepreneurship of African-Yemenis – a marginalized population in Yemen. We hope the Fulbright community is inspired by Ammar Mohammed’s – and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s – work in promoting positive change within their communities.
We are living the most technologically advanced generation of all times – yet have some of the most pressing challenges in the history of humanity – be it economic, environmental, social, or political. As a Fulbright Student in sustainable development, I always contemplate the solutions for those challenges. I believe that a sustainable solution is a combination of addressing the above challenges. I see social entrepreneurship as the key to solving economic and social challenges—putting into account preserving the environment—that creates new markets and promotes social integration and participation. Entrepreneurs are leaders who transform communities. Entrepreneurs can also multiply their impact by lobbying the government for more support for young people and legislation that encourages entrepreneurial ideas. I believe that this hybrid model of social entrepreneurship and policy advocacy will be my first priority to tackling present challenges.
During the past year, I’ve come to see how this generation has diversified mindsets. There is a tendency to change the status quo through various means available exclusively to the Millennial generation. There are numerous campaign initiatives to improve the life of the less fortunate and for social justice around the world. The most striking aspect, however, is that this generation tends to shift entrepreneurship to be more socially oriented, using technology to that end. Social entrepreneurship, crowd-funding and impact investing show how a business can solve a social challenge and at the same time be profitable. In fact, this is one aspect I will definitely take back with me to Yemen and work to promote it.
Seanghuoy Ho, 2012-2014, Cambodia examining antibacterial compounds’ efficacy against the bacterial community known as “biofilm” in the laboratory at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
When I was a little girl, I once watched a science program on TV in which I saw people wearing long white coats and goggles, holding long, round tubes. The tubes contained cloudy solutions and the people were viewing these solutions under machines called microscopes. I learned from that TV show that those solutions contained bacteria and that they were living creatures. Bacteria come in different shapes and colors, and need food, oxygen and specific temperatures in order to survive. As a kid, I was excited to learn more about these tiny creatures, even though at that time, I had no clue as to why people would want to study them. I dreamed about becoming a scientist one day and conducting research on these wonderful, tiny living things.
Now, thanks to a Fulbright Foreign Student grant, I am a master’s degree student in microbiology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Since my childhood, I’ve learned a great deal about microbes, specifically bacteria. I realize that I mostly saw bacteria on TV when they caused an outbreak. The majority of bacteria, however, are harmless and even beneficial to human beings. Antibiotics, chemical compounds produced by particular bacteria and used to treat many diseases, are one typical example of their benefits.