Fulbright program stays strong

PLU remains one of the top universities for Fulbright Fellows

Anna Duke

Mast News Reporter

PLU was recently ranked fourth of the top four masters-granting institutions with regards to the number of students participating in the Fulbright fellowship. Since 1975, PLU’s Fulbright program has produced 75 U.S. Fulbright Fellows in the history of the university.

“I think the university’s long-standing success of securing the Fulbright fellowship is a tribute to the quality of our academic programs, to our remarkable students, and to our global focus,” President Loren Anderson said.

PLU’s current Fulbright program adviser, Troy Storfjell, says one of the reasons for PLU’s success is its large and rigorous language and literatures department.

“If we didn’t have such a big languages and literatures department, we wouldn’t have so many students applying to countries with language requirements,” Storfjell said. He added that 43 of the 75 PLU students who received the Fulbright award had at least one major in languages and literatures, and 21 had minored in a language.

However, both Anderson and Storfjell didn’t cease from praising Rodney Swenson, former Fulbright program adviser to PLU, and under which the first of PLU’s 75 Fulbright recipients to date have received the Fulbright award.

“He did an amazing job, making students go through multiple drafts of their applications,” Storfjell said.

Students could count on an average of eight to 10 revisions, and before finally mailing off the applications to an office in New York, there would be a mandatory campus interview, part of which would be conducted in the language of the student’s chosen country of expertise.

“My fundamental responsibility has been to encourage students to apply and to have those essays extremely well done,” Swenson said.

Along with this investment comes many benefits. The rewards are transportation from one’s hometown to the chosen country, excess baggage allowance, payment of all tuition and fees, a stipend paid in the currency of the host country, settling in expenses and having the benefit of putting the prestigious award on a future resume for a future career.

Dr. Neil Kelleher, a ’92 PLU graduate and a current chemistry professor at the University of Illinois, testified to the benefits of having received a Fulbright scholarship with the help of PLU.

“Of the greater than 120 Fulbrighters to Germany, there were three natural science people,” Kelleher wrote in an e-mail. “While in the Chemistry Department at the University of Konstanz, I met Professor Fred W. McLafferty and my life changed.”

After leaving the Fulbright program, Kelleher went on to get his Ph.D. with McLafferty at Cornell University and has since received numerous honors and rewards, including a NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship from Harvard University and a Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry in 2006. However, Kelleher notes, the Fulbright Grant came before all the other rewards in his impressive curriculum vitae.

Jessica Hanson, an ‘07 PLU graduate and one of the four PLU graduates currently studying abroad on a Fulbright scholarship, is working part-time as an English teaching assistant in Austria while at the same time working on her project titled “Austrian Approaches to Immigration.”

As part of her research, Hanson studies Austrian immigration policy and volunteers at an organization, Chiala Afriqas, which works with African immigrants.

Hanson had a learning experience while doing her research abroad when she saw one of her fellow workers from Chiala Afriqas and his wife face roadblocks when trying to gain citizenship for his own children, even though both he and his wife were citizens.

“While many Austrians are welcoming to immigrants, this experience showed me just some of the challenges that immigrants face who try to work their way legally through the system,” Hanson said.

Along with Hanson in Austria, three other PLU Fulbrighters are currently studying abroad in Ecuador, Indonesia and Korea.

Swenson said that one of the positive elements of PLU’s success with the Fulbright program is that it not only got a great deal of publicity for PLU, but that it also emboldened professors to encourage students to apply, even during their junior year.

“The interest in the Fulbright program has grown with its successes,” Swenson said. “Students see other winners and comment, ‘I can do that too.’”