I’m off to the USA

It might be understating things to say that I am very excited to have been offered a Fulbright Scholarship! One of my colleagues, on hearing the news, sent me the words from Paul Simon’s song ‘I know what I know’

“She moved so easily all I could think of was sunlight,

I said, ‘aren’t you the woman who was recently given a Fulbright?'”

A friend said to me “I thought it was just presidential candidates who received Fulbright Scholarships”! In fact there are 370,000 Fulbright alumni around the world. Many of them are US citizens going to other countries to study and work. Each year the UK selects approximately 40 Fulbrighters in a highly competitive process (approx 25 students going to study Masters courses and PhDs and 15 Fulbright Scholars including me, who are people going out to research, teach and work). Biographies from this year’s Fulbrighters will be available soon on the Fulbright Commission web pages. I’ll post a link in a future blog as soon as these are available because my cohort is made up of amazing people.

© Leo Johnson 2019

Here we are having on our Fulbright orientation days at Goodenough College, London. In case you are wondering (which many of us Fulbrighters did), the College is named after a Mr Goodenough, and focuses on providing accommodation for postgraduate students – nothing to do with the calibre of students and staff who visit! The orientation days included each Fulbrighter presenting about the particular projects they will be working on. It was a fantastic way to get to know one another and find out the things we have in common as well as the diversity across our group. One of the highlights of the orientation days for me was a panel What is America Talking About? on US culture/society/current affairs for which one of the speakers was James Naughtie from the BBC. His astute analysis of American politics and culture was inspiring, and I hope to listen to his advice to all of us for our time in the USA – “travel, travel, travel”.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *