U.S. Fulbright Archives - Page 31 of 72 - Fulbright Student Program Blog

A World of Imagination

August 10, 2015

Julie Baer, 2011-2012, Fulbright English Teaching Assistant to Malaysia (third from left) with students engaged in one of their final Imagination Nation projects involving building moon landers which protect eggs dropped from the third floor of a building

Every Wednesday afternoon at SK Seri Bunian, a small elementary school in Pontian, Malaysia, my English Language club Imagination Nation, gathered together to delve into the world of our imaginations. My students walked into the classroom and picked up their passports which “permit the citizens of the Imagination Nation to pass without delay or hindrance, to any place as far and wide as their imagination will take them.” We transformed into robots and then became the engineers who created them. We flew around the world, saw how pollution and plastics harm our Earth, and then made recycling boxes to keep our school clean; we Skyped with a NASA Astronaut Educator Diane Sartore and made moon-landing devices. But when the clock struck 1:30 p.m., we were back in Seri Bunian.

To me, being a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) was much more than practicing sentence structure with my students. My English Language club and other school activities sought to challenge my students to think creatively. I wanted my students to harness their imagination, work determinedly to achieve their dreams, and turn the figments of their imagination into reality.

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Help Us, to Help You, to Help Others

August 6, 2015

Tiffany N. Burd (second from left, middle row) at the Community Support Worker Graduation Ceremony in Cape Town, South Africa

Receiving a Fulbright U.S. Student grant fulfilled a lifelong dream of working in one of the most challenging communities in the world: a South African township. The grant allowed me to research the strengths of an extremely impoverished community with an estimated 40% HIV prevalence rate. The findings of the assessment were used to plan and implement HIV prevention programs at a local community resource center, Butterfly House, which serves 400 orphans and vulnerable children.

I conducted hundreds of interviews with people living around Butterfly House and quickly realized their strength. While interviewing a woman in her shack, I learned of her community activism efforts. She had mobilized over five hundred women to sign petitions to shut down a local pub that had been serving underage youth. A man shared his interest in nutrition and his endeavor to build a community garden. Others spoke of their participation in neighborhood watches. The list continued to grow and I left each interview knowing that each of us had shared a moment of mutual understanding of the world.

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Chica in Costa Rica

August 3, 2015

Taylor Bernard, 2012-2013, Fulbright English Teaching Assistant to Costa Rica (center), with her host niece and nephew, Maria Fernanda and Esteban

My experience as a Fulbright English Language Teaching Assistant (ETA) in Costa Rica was nothing short of amazing. Upon my arrival in February of 2012, I knew instantly that the next 10 months would change my life forever. I served as an ETA at La Universidad Nacional in the rural city of Heredia. I assisted in over five different classes on subjects such as grammar, creative writing, and North American culture. A huge part of my job was assisting in student development in actually learning the English language. I participated in study groups, oral discussions/presentations, and even practiced with students through song! During my stay in Heredia, I also took advantage of staying with a Costa Rican family as an exchange student. It was an awesome experience as I was able to interact with natives of my host country and completely immerse myself in Costa Rican culture. My host mother was unbelievably welcoming and leaving her after my stay was one of the hardest things I have ever done. The 10 months spent in one of the most traveled countries in Central America were some of the most amazing months I have ever experienced.

Outside of assistant teaching, I was able to lead many class discussions and give presentations on several topics related to both North American culture and also different topics of choice. With a research interest in Afro-Hispanic culture and identity, I took the liberty of introducing the topic of “racism in Latin America”. With the help of the great Afro-Hispanic author Quince Duncan, Costa Rica’s first Afro-Caribbean writer in the Spanish language, I was able to successfully give a presentation on the topic (for the first time ever) at the university and open an intense discussion regarding racism in Central America. I was able to discuss the correlation between racism in Latin America and the institutionalized racism that exists even today in the United States. For me, presenting on this particular topic was the most memorable and influential experience as it allowed for the discussion of a topic otherwise considered “taboo” in Latin America. Seeing the emotion in my students’ eyes and reading their reflections on the topic was more gratifying than anything.

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From Bean to Cup: A Year in a Global Coffee Capital

July 30, 2015

Senay Kahsay, 2013-2014, Ethiopia (left) and friends enjoying a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony alongside Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile River in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

During the 2013-2014 academic year, I was awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student grant to Ethiopia to study the coffee supply chain.

Growing up in two different cities with strong coffee cultures inspired my appreciation for coffee from a young age. As a child in Addis Ababa, I experienced the rich communal process of the Ethiopian coffee tradition. Later, when my family and I moved to Seattle, I observed the meticulous and creative craft of preparing and marketing specialty coffee. This inspired my desire to develop a better understanding of how my favorite drink travels from farm to cup. As a Fulbright Student in Ethiopia, I studied the country’s coffee supply chain. From my base in the capital, I made trips throughout Ethiopia’s coffee-growing regions to develop my understanding of the industry by surveying farmers, processors, cooperatives, traders and exporters. Through these surveys, I outlined the industry’s demand forecast and communication methods and identified opportunities for improvement. I performed these surveys with the help of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX)—a recently established marketplace that has revolutionized Ethiopian agricultural commodity markets by providing farmers with price transparency and other market information. My project provided the ECX with better visibility of the coffee supply chain.

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The Strands Coming Together: An Indian-American in Mumbai

July 27, 2015

Aditya Voleti, 2011-2012, India (orange umbrella), joins some IIT-Bombay students in doing some monsoon exploration of the mountains of Matheran surrounding the city of Mumbai, India

My Fulbright year can be described as the culmination of all the disparate strands of my academic career and personal identity. I was an Indian-American double-major in Mathematics and Sanskrit; so it made sense to go to Mumbai (also known as Bombay) and live for a year as an American expatriate in India translating Sanskrit mathematical texts into English.

My application came together through constant talks with professors, their connections, their connections’ connections and so on. I advise potential applicants to tap into their professors’ networks as well. Through my professors, I was connected with a Sanskrit mathematician to host me at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and with editors who used their deep research and Fulbright knowledge to make my application a winning one.

While I could have gone to one of over 140 different countries on a Fulbright grant, tying my application to India was a conscious decision. Living in Bombay with an independent income, in my own room, while making friends at a university could not have been a more radical departure from my previous experiences in the country, where I was chauffeured around by my family and mainly interacted with my cousins. As one of several Indian-American Fulbrighters, I was able to bring a different, and crucial, element to the cross-cultural exchange. If you find an opportunity in your heritage country, consider it seriously.

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Impact Begins with the Individual

July 20, 2015

Stephanie Herzog, 2012-2013, Fulbright English Teaching Assistant to Romania (left, back row by blackboard) takes some of her students from her English Language Enthusiasts Club at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi, Romania to a local middle school English class to give her university students hands-on English teaching experience

About a year after I had completed my Fulbright English Language Teaching Assistantship (ETA) in Romania, I received an email from a student in one of the literary analysis courses I had taught at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi:

“…In the past few days I’ve been rereading Fitzgerald’s ‘Babylon’ revisited and ‘Cathedral’ by Raymond Carver and I actually got myself a copy of S. Anderson’s ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ because I had a very nice time reading the first short story of the collection. I am writing you this email because I really wanted to thank you for the wonderful opportunity you gave us to study these beautiful short stories and for the great way of discussing them in class. Your teaching method, academic and professional yet very warm and good-hearted, had a very high impact on me and made me actually look for more stories from those authors and even others. Thanks to you, I’m a little more into American literature than I was before, and I’m really grateful for that…”

Measuring the impact you have had on the local community you lived in while completing a Fulbright grant is not very easy, but this message reminded me that impact begins on an individual level. Everyone I had encountered and worked with while I was in Romania resulted in a very unique cultural and educational exchange that challenged my own mindset. It was nice to know, from the email above, that I challenged the mindsets of those I had met as well.

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