Fulbright Alumni Ambassador Archives - Page 4 of 8

The Power of Immeasurable Curiosity and Passion in Greece

August 31, 2016

Evy Vourlides, 2013-2014, Greece

I lived in the neighborhood of Koukaki—below the Acropolis and just a short walk from Panteion University, my academic home during my nine months as a Fulbright U.S. Student in Greece. The small details of my daily life in Athens were unexpectedly tremendous. I had a Greek bank account, a lease, and a phone contract. This meant learning firsthand the experience of waiting in line at the bank, signing contracts, and paying bills as (albeit temporary) a member of Greek society. Greeting the baker down the street, who knew me by name, cracking a passing joke with the beet vendor at the community market, practicing yoga on a rooftop with a beautiful group of new friends under a closing day’s sky—these memories continue to bring me deep joy and reflect the great love I have developed for Greece. These details are what the Fulbright Program is about because they lead to something greater.

Senator J. William Fulbright headed efforts for the Fulbright Program after the Second World War. He believed that educational and cultural exchanges would lead to intimate intercultural understanding, and could promote peace of global proportions.

Understanding and empathy inevitably result from working, studying, and carrying out daily tasks in a new place, amongst a new group of people, for a prolonged period of time. This becomes a space where discussion and, ultimately, diplomacy can flourish.

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U.S. Fulbright

A Year of Knee Research and Social Outreach in the Rainbow Nation

August 29, 2016

Mathieu S. Davis, 2013-2014, South Africa (center), with his Grade R class at Ikaya Primary School in the township of Kayamandi, just outside of Stellenbosch. Every Friday, he would meet with these children to teach them English and play games in collaboration with their classroom teacher. In return, they taught Mathieu Xhosa. Whether it was ‘1-2-3 Red Light’, ‘Duck-Duck-Goose’ or a chaotic game of football (soccer), a great time learning and playing together was had by all.

My Fulbright in Stellenbosch, South Africa, was divided into two primary areas: research and community outreach. The research portion of my fellowship focused on knee replacement implants and the different tribological properties of current materials used in these devices. For this project, I had to build a device that functioned as a pin-on-plate wear tester, which would generate particles over the course of time that could be measured using simple distillation techniques to determine the degree of wear particles produced. My research aimed to determine the most effective combination of materials to limit debris and particle accumulation during extensive wear testing. I also performed additional research in gait analysis as a means of biometric identification. For this project, I had to come up with a novel statistical and repeatable method that could determine through statistical principles, the likelihood that two gait profiles are similar or different. This expertise was utilized by the South African Police Department as a potential identification tool of a crime suspect.

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U.S. Fulbright

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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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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U.S. Fulbright

Art and Understanding

May 24, 2016

Alex Anderson, 2014-2015, China, working on one of his ceramic sculptures in the studio

During my Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant, I spent 10-months at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where I studied ink painting and was an artist-in-residence in the ceramics department. Considering art as a reflection of the interior world of its maker, it allowed for a clear and genuine lens into the specific interests, psychologies, and motivations of the people in my studio during this period. Prior to my time in China, I had not considered art as a tool for cultural exchange, but the questions that sourced from discussions of each person’s work often moved from the work itself to considerations of its place in contemporary art in China, America, and beyond.

People seemed to view my work and me as equally viable specimens for inspection of what it means to be an American and what American art looks like. There was an interest in the way work was rendered, comments surrounding its content, and discussions of its aesthetic that ultimately led to dialogues about what it means to be an American and the fact that there is no universal definition, as America is an immigrant, hybrid nation. In this respect, art became my primary means of creating mutual understanding and serving as a cultural ambassador. The first question people would ask when they walked through the studio was, “Who made this?” followed by “Where is he from?” These questions opened up spaces for further dialogue around the intersection of Chinese and American art, and sometimes led to discussions of the intersection of China and America.

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U.S. Fulbright

Conversations on Tolerance and Equality: Living and Learning in Tajikistan

May 16, 2016

Chane Corp, 2014-2015, Fulbright ETA to Tajikistan

Chane Corp, 2014-2015, Fulbright English Teaching Assistant to Tajikistan, celebrating World Earth Day by volunteering in Khorog City Park with students from various students from different American Corners’ clubs.

As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I knew there would be stigma surrounding this group in Tajikistan. While on my 10-month grant, I wanted nothing more than to be a personal advocate for tolerance; however, while studying and teaching in Kyrgyzstan, I developed an appreciation for keeping this personal information private. At various times, I have been told that this sort of discretion is not being true to who I am – but I disagree. Immersing yourself in another culture necessitates a sincere respect for local norms and opinions; being a successful cultural ambassador means finding the common ground that will allow you to be a productive, valued, member of your host community. Being a Fulbright grantee means you represent more than your own opinion; it means you are larger than your own passions.

When discussing sensitive issues abroad, my focus was always on the singular issue of tolerance. I sought to have difficult conversations with my students – ones that challenged not only their views, but also my own. When the racially charged unrest in Ferguson, Missouri hit its peak in November, 2014, the Russian news media (which is by far better funded and more chic than local Tajik outlets) devoted significant resources to covering the tension. Every night, nightly news would show dramatic footage of rioting and more than a few of my students genuinely believed that America, as a country, was on the verge of collapse. As dramatized as the Russian version of events were, this depiction offered a valuable opportunity for a frank and honest discussion about social issues in America and, indeed, around the world.

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