CONWAY, ARK. (April 17, 2009) –Hendrix College seniors Rachel DeCuir and Jessica Rood have been named Fulbright Scholars by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
DeCuir, a Lafayette, La., native, will use her Fulbright Scholarship to work in Thailand. She will fly into Bangkok for a six-week language immersion program, where she will add yet another language to her repertoire. A French major, DeCuir has studied French for more than half her life, and has also taken two years of both Chinese and Spanish, and a year of German. She decided to apply to Thailand because she "wanted to try Asia."
"I know that I want to go back to France eventually, but I kind of wanted something completely different," DeCuir said. She spent her junior year at the Universite de Lille. "I don't have any ties at the moment. I don't have a car; I don't have a pet; I don't have a significant other; I don't have a grad school. If there were ever a good time to just go to the complete opposite end of the world for a year, now is probably one of the few times."
After the language program, DeCuir will be assigned to a school. Thailand is about the size of California, and DeCuir has no idea which region she'll be assigned to, nor whether she will be a full-fledged English teacher or a conversation assistant, or some combination of both. Either way, she feels prepared for the challenge. She works at the Hendrix Writing Center, where she specializes in helping students for whom English is not a first language. That work, in combination with her vast experience as a language learner, has given her a good basis to build on.
"I can take the methods I've seen that work and take what I've seen that causes issues, and go from there," she said.
After her Fulbright year, DeCuir hopes to get her master's degree in a French-speaking European country. She foresees a career in diplomacy.
"I like people and culture and language," she said, "so to be continually exposed to those, to bring different countries together and help them harmonize, would be really exciting and something I think I'd really enjoy doing."
Rood, a double major in German and International Relations and Global Studies, will utilize her Fulbright Scholarship to teach in Germany. Rood has moved around the country most of her life with her mother, who is in the Air Force. She graduated from high school in San Antonio, Texas, where she began learning German in order to fulfill a graduation requirement. Hendrix also requires its students to develop a proficiency in a foreign language, so Rood stuck with German.
"I started in German 110 with Dr. [Wayne] Oudekerk, and within the first six weeks I fell in love with it," Rood said. She spent her junior year in Graz, Austria, taking classes in German through the Hendrix-in-Graz program.
Rood was just notified last week that she had been awarded the Fulbright Scholarship.
"I sent in my application in October, but I started the application process last July," Rood said. "In January I found out I had made it past the first selection round and was still being considered. I’ve been on pins and needles since then; it’s been a long process."
Although she has not received her information packet from the Fulbright officials yet, she expects she will be assigned to work as a teaching assistant at a German high school. Rood has experience as a language teacher: she works as a German tutor at Hendrix, and she also tutors two Hendrix professors' daughters in German.
When Rood returns from Germany, she wants to join Peace Corps or work with a non-governmental organization dedicated to human rights.
"After getting some field work with human rights, I want to go to graduate school for international law focusing on human rights, and in the end I would like to reform the human rights sector of the United Nations. That’s just the big picture, big plan; it’s not set in stone."
The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.” With this goal as a starting point, the Fulbright Program has provided almost 300,000 participants—chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential — with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.
The Fulbright Program was established in 1946 under legislation introduced by then-Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. Approximately 294,000 “Fulbrighters,” 111,000 from the United States and 183,000 from other countries, have participated in the Program since its inception more than 60 years ago. The Fulbright Program awards approximately 7,500 new grants annually.
Currently, the Fulbright Program operates in over 155 countries worldwide.
Hendrix, founded in 1876, is a selective, residential, undergraduate liberal arts college emphasizing experiential learning in a demanding yet supportive environment. The college is among 165 colleges featured in the 2009 edition of the Princeton Review America’s Best Value Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For more information, visit www.hendrix.edu.