Carleton announces five Fulbright grant winners
Meet the Carls who will spend a year abroad on prestigious Fulbright grants.
Five Carleton seniors were recently awarded prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Program grants.
The Fulbright exchange program allows upcoming graduates and recent alumni to participate in advanced research, international graduate study, and teaching at primary and secondary school in more than 140 countries worldwide. Around 1,900 U.S. Student grants are awarded annually in all fields of study.
While in their host countries, Carleton’s five winners will spend a year living and learning “on a one-to-one basis in an atmosphere of openness, academic integrity, and intellectual freedom, thereby promoting mutual understanding.” Among the Fulbright factors in selecting grantees: Quality and feasibility of their proposal, academic record, personal qualifications, language preparation, and an eagerness to promote active engagement with a host community.
The Fulbright projects are profiled below:
Meg Crenshaw ’17
- Raleigh, N.C.
- Major: Mathematics and Computer Science
- Fulbright Location: Galicia, Spain
I am doing an English Teaching Fulbright at a secondary school in Galicia. I will be assisting English language courses and other subjects taught in English. In addition, I may be giving English instruction to teachers or other staff at the school. The schools I will be working with are plurilingual, all speaking Spanish, Galician, and English.
I am most excited about the prospect of teaching mathematics, as I want to be a math teacher in the United States. More generally, I will have the opportunity to practice my teaching in a new environment with different norms. I am also excited to continue to speak Spanish, as well as possibly learn a bit of Galician! Finally, as Galicia has some Celtic history, I am looking forward to exploring this side of Spain, maybe even doing some Scottish Highland Dancing (a childhood activity of mine) while listening to bagpipes.
Graham Earley ’17
- Minneapolis, MN
- Major: Computer Science, Math/Statistics
- Fulbright Location: Pune, India
While I was studying abroad in Pune in the fall of 2015, I began working on a mobile app for an Indian education nonprofit that was interested in distributing creative lesson plans to teachers in Maharashtra—especially those in rural areas. Many of these teachers do not have the time or resources to come up with their own engaging lesson plans. Last summer, we released the app to the public and quickly reached over 12,000 installs. For my Fulbright year, I will return to Pune to continue work on the app and to assess the app’s impact on the classroom by observing classes where it is used. I intend for my first sixth months to be spent visiting classrooms, interviewing teachers, and taking their feedback into account in the app’s design, while also working with my host organization to continue developing lesson content. For the remainder of my time, I will work to expand the app’s reach beyond the state of Maharashtra by traveling to other states and by adding new languages and lessons to the app.
I look forward to working with my host organization again. I grew to be good friends with many of the people in the organization, and I can’t wait to spend a longer period of time with them. I’m also really excited to work on a project that has a fairly significant user base and a goal that I’m passionate about. This, combined with the autonomy I will have over my work, makes me excited to continue the project.
Joshua Reason ’17
- Palo Alto, CA
- Major: Latin American Studies
- Fulbright Location: Brazil
For my Fulbright, I will be returning to Salvador da Bahia, the third largest city in Brazil, to conduct research on Blackness, queerness, non-binary gender identities, and urban space. Specifically, I will investigate how queer Afro-Brazilians conceptualize urban development projects and other local phenomena related to the politics of space (i.e. policing, gentrification, tourism, and hate crimes). I will be working with artistic collectives and Black youth activist organizations to gain a better understanding of how queer Afro-Brazilians are responding to these impositions on their spatiality. Overall, I hope that this project highlights the ways in which Brazilian urban planning has excluded the perspectives of Black, queer, and female-identified individuals.
I am most looking forward to living in Brazil for a year! After spending a gap year in Bahia and returning this past summer to work on comps, Brazil has become somewhat of a second home for me. In addition to producing necessary scholarship on marginalized communities, I will also get the opportunity to spend time with my friends in Salvador. Many of them also played an important role in my comps research, so I intend to use this trip to share that research with them in the most productive ways possible.
Jesse Rothbard ’17
- Woodside, CA
- Major: Spanish
- Fulbright Location: Argentina
As a Spanish major and avid reader, I am thrilled to share my love of language and passion for literature with my students over the coming year as a Fulbright fellow. Drawing on my experiences in theater at Carleton, I hope to experiment with skits and scenes as an interactive form of teaching English as a second language. I am also excited to have the opportunity to continue my research into Latin American detective stories, and to further explore how this literary genre has become a catalyst for social change in Argentinean society.
In the next year, I most look forward to seeing old friends from the provinces, reading loads of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, and finally learning how to make mate (a traditional South American beverage) correctly. I’m overjoyed to have this opportunity, and I’m tremendously thankful for the support of my friends, family, and professors for helping me along the way.
Georgia Schmitt ’17
- Saint Paul, MN
- Major: Biology
- Fulbright Location: Brunei
I’ll be collecting data on the distribution and ecology of small carnivores and cats in the protected rainforests of Brunei to inform conservation plans. Despite their ecological importance and location in a global biodiversity hotspot, Bornean carnivores receive little conservation attention compared to more social and charismatic species like the Bornean orangutan. These carnivore species—which include animals like otters, weasels, civets, wild cats, and mongooses—are extremely shy and seldom observed, making research a difficult and unusual challenge. Because of this, many of these species have been designated “data deficient” by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) and have no solid conservation plan. I will be employing a novel technique to detect these species via the genetic material they leave behind in their environment (eDNA), as well as more reliable, widely used methods to elucidate their distribution and ecology. Because feasible conservation strategies are based on this data, l hope that my research contributes both to the development of conservation plans for these specific species and to the body of research techniques used to study shy and rare species around the world.
In addition to working on my project, I’m really looking forward to getting to know students and faculty at the University of Brunei, exploring the rainforest, and basking in the heat after 23 straight (winters) in Minnesota. I’m also thrilled about what I’ll be eating—Bruneian food is an interesting blend of cuisines from around the region. I’m excited to learn how to prepare some new dishes!