Seven Emory undergraduate students and one graduate student have been awarded the Fulbright Scholarship, which gives recipients the opportunity to teach English and conduct research in foreign countries for a year.

College seniors Max Goldman, Eduardo Hazera, Lucia Lorenz, Phoebe Young, Sarah Coleman, John Culnan and Jessica Wahi as well as Jessica Lambert (‘10C), were all awarded the scholarship and, if they accept, will be going overseas in the fall. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international education exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government, according to the scholarship’s website.

Hazera said he applied for the scholarship because he loves the freedom of independent research.

According to Goldman, students must be of high academic standing, have shown that they have made an impact on campus and have a connection with the country where they want to study to be considered for the scholarship.

Goldman also said the application process involved a general application, interviews and two essays.

“My favorite part about the application process was writing the grant proposal,” Hazera commented in an email to the Wheel. “In many ways, a grant proposal is like a well articulated daydream, and I love daydreaming.”

Goldman and Lorenz will be teaching English in Thailand and Germany, respectively. Coleman and Culnan are also doing the English teaching assistantship that the Fulbright Scholarship offers.

Culnan will be going to Macau, China and Coleman will be going to Madrid, Spain. Coleman said she applied for the scholarship because she wanted to return to Spain after studying abroad in Salamanca.

“I’m also considering becoming a teacher, so I thought that the Fulbright’s English Teaching Assistantship would be the ideal option for me,” Coleman wrote in an email to the Wheel.

Young will be going to Germany to enroll in a two-year master’s program in chemical biology at the Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, and Hazera will be studying and researching ethnomusicology in Malaysia.

“I will be studying the interactions between bird songs and indigenous music,” Hazera wrote.

All of the recipients said they are excited to travel to their prospective countries.

“At first it was disbelief; then, I was ecstatic,” Goldman said. “I had been hoping but not expecting this. It’s the best surprise I could have gotten.”

Coleman said she is really looking forward to returning to Spain.

“I loved the culture and beautiful architecture when I went there for a semester,” she said.
Young explained that she applied for the scholarship because she wanted to study in Jena, Germany, as it is one of the best locations to study chemical ecology, the field she wants to study.

“I’m really interested in chemical ecology, the study of how organisms communicate with each other via chemical signals,” Young wrote in an email to the Wheel. “The Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, which is in Jena, is the center of the relatively young field.”

Lorenz said that she is excited because the Fulbright gives her the opportunity to spend more time in Germany.

Lorenz said she interned in Munich for a summer and studied abroad in Berlin for a semester but said the Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship will put him in a whole new environment that will be challenging and exciting.

Wahi, who will be conducting research at the Cancer Epigenetics and Biology Program in Barcelona, applied for the scholarship because she wanted to take a year off before entering medical school.

Like Coleman, Wahi said she wanted to return to Spain after studying abroad in 2010.
“I’m excited to gain experience working in an international lab, it will be great preparation for medical school,” Wahi wrote in an email. “I’m also excited to take a year off from classes and return to Spain.”

— Contact Nicholas Sommariva.