Fulbright Enrichment Seminar
MEGHANN CURTIS
Enrichment Seminars are a component of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, in which we bring the foreign students together in nine different groupings to different cities all around the United States.
PAULINE MILWOOD
The Fulbright Program is really a platform for cultural and academic exchange.
DANA DWEIK
It brings all these people from other parts of the world to the U.S. to get the experience to exchange cultures, to learn the best in the U.S., and then go back home and apply all these specialties and experiences that we learned.
JUAN PANE SOLIS
Study abroad opens your eyes, opens your mind and kills this prejudice that we develop if we live just in our culture.
MEGHANN CURTIS
When these students come together in these cities, our objectives are really threefold. First is to have the foreign students get to know each other.
SARAH WAGNER
I think it was just fascinating to meet so many different people from so many different countries and get their perspective, not only on the U.S., but also on the Fulbright experience and their future plans.
OLENA ZHYLINKOVA
We understand each other very quickly. It’s an amazing experience talking to people from different countries.
MEGHANN CURTIS
The second component is to have the foreign Fulbright students get to know a different part of the country. In this aspect, they participate in community service activities in the cities that they go to. They hear from different public speakers from that city, politicians, professionals, community service workers, and they really get to know the culture and the fabric of that city.
LAURA GISSELLE PIMENTEL FERREIRA
Well, we are just trying to do some jobs to help the community to have a free garden.
ROMAN MADZIA
In Europe, this type of community service, like voluntary one, is not very common, so it’s really nice to see how it works in the U.S.
MEGHANN CURTIS
The third component of the enrichment seminar is really for the American public to get to know the Fulbright foreign student. In cities all over the country, this group of foreign Fulbright students comes together. They go out into the community and interface with Americans who would typically not get to meet an individual from Azerbaijan or Zimbabwe.
KATE MANOLAKOS
We have an opportunity every year to host Fulbright students when they come through for the enrichment seminar. It’s a fantastic experience just to get all these different cultures in my house for one evening.
HAPPY KHOZA
At least once, now, I’ve met an American family and I’m talking with them. From there, I hope, you meet with people and you start connections.
MEGHANN CURTIS
Because this is a presidential election year in the United States, this year’s enrichment seminar focused on U.S. politics and elections, democracy in action. At the end of each seminar, the students participated in an election simulation to demonstrate all that they had learned.
PAULINE MILWOOD
The participants are given an opportunity, given that it’s 2012, to really be a part of understanding better what the political process in the United States itself is all about. So, prior to coming here, we all received demographic identities, such as being a baby boomer or an immigrant, and with those identities, we took on certain roles. We had to elect certain members, Democratic, Republican. Really it seemed like a real-life situation. Each party had to basically look at their candidates and determine, based on a position statement, why that candidate really fit the role best for leader of the political party. After they vote on which candidate will represent each party, we will have a final election in which both candidates, the Republican representative and the Democratic representative, also engage in a debate. So, it was very debate-based, but again, it’s such an excellent opportunity because it has really given me personally, and so many other Fulbrighters, an inside look as to really how the election process works here.
MEGHANN CURTIS
With the goal of the Fulbright program being mutual understanding, this year’s topic for the enrichment seminar is particularly meaningful. There is perhaps no more American of an element of our society than our democratic process. To be able to convey to all these foreign students exactly what it is that we do in this country to elect our representatives, I think was incredibly important for us, but I also think very meaningful for the foreign students themselves. This gives them a sense of the American electoral process that I think is far more nuanced than perhaps what they see in the media or elsewhere.
