Northwestern Named Top Fulbright Producing Institution For 19th Year

Northwestern was recently named a Fulbright Top Producing Institution by the U.S. Department of State for the 19th consecutive year. This year, 20 students and alumni received Fulbright awards, which allow them to teach, study and conduct research around the world.

“This achievement is a testament to your institution’s deep commitment to international exchange and to building lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote in a letter to Northwestern President Michael H. Schill.

The Fulbright program is the United States’ flagship international educational exchange program, funded by an annual appropriation from Congress. Through the Student Program, about 2,000 recent university graduates, graduate students, artists, or other early career professionals pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad each year.

“I’m so proud that Northwestern continues to produce an exceptional number of Fulbright grantees. It’s a wonderful way for us to further our global engagement as an institution while having a positive impact around the world,” said President Schill.

More than 400 Northwestern alumni have participated in the Fulbright program since its inception in 1946.

Northwestern Now caught up with a few new Fulbrighters, including two Weinberg College alumni and a current Ph.D. student below to learn about what they have been studying and the ways in which they are fostering positive cross-cultural exchange.

William Paik, ’20, has been using his Fulbright research scholarship to study and perform stand-up comedy in Seoul, South Korea, for the past five months. Paik previously performed in Chicago and has embraced the challenge of performing in Korea while studying how cultural dynamics shape comedy abroad.

Alina Junejo, ’22, already had a seal of biliteracy from the State of Illinois when she left to teach English in Spain at a school outside Madrid. However, the experience of teaching English in Spanish to both students and teachers has left her with even better fluency, she said, including more familiarity with the vosotros verb form.

Rachel Sarcevic-Tesanovic, a current Ph.D. student, is based in Aix-en-Provence, France, for her research Fulbright. She is studying the history of free women of African descent in the Francophone Atlantic world of the 18th century by reading documents from the French colonial empire preserved at the Archives nationales d’outre-mer.