APPLETON, WIS. — Monica Felix has never ventured outside the friendly confines of the United States, but she is about to get an extended education on living abroad courtesy of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
The Lawrence University senior from Thiensville has been named a 2007-08 Fulbright Scholar and awarded a fellowship that will send her to Germany for 10 months. Beginning this September, Felix will work as an English teaching assistant at a school equivalent to an American high school in the western state of Hessen.
This is the second straight year a Lawrence student has received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English in Germany. Felix is the sixth Lawrence student named a Fulbright Scholar since 2001.
Felix admits to experiencing a momentary state of “utter disbelief” when she was informed she had been selected for the program.
“I never expected anything like this would happen to me,” said Felix, who will graduate in June with a double major in German and linguistics. “I actually didn’t believe it until I received the second letter of confirmation.”
In addition to honing her language skills, Felix says she is excited about the invaluable opportunity to spread her cultural wings during her time abroad.
“All I’ve known and been exposed to are American customs. I’m really looking forward to discovering the day-to-day differences between German culture and ours,” said Felix.
Felix said she has always found language fascinating. She is fluent in Spanish as well as German and “as a hobby,” taught herself Russian to the point she’s now proficient reading and speaking it. She began dabbling in German as a seventh grader because she wanted to learn something outside the Romance languages.
“After my initial exposure, I discovered I really liked it and just stuck with it.”
This spring, Felix completed an honors project in German on 19th-century author Theodor Fontane, in which she analyzed the speech of characters from six of his novels. Her project examined the way the characters in the novels talked about women and expressed their expectations of women and then compared that to actual historical representations of 19th-century women to see how well they matched.
“While my research for this project has given me a better insight into German literature and cultural norms of the time, I’m looking forward to seeing what present day German culture is like.”
While her immediate plans are focused on coping by herself for the first time in a foreign country, Felix says her long-range goals include graduate school to pursue studies in German literature or possibly linguistics.
“There’s a lot of exciting things being done with discourse analysis,” said Felix.
The Fulbright Program was created by Congress in 1946 to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges. Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, who sponsored the legislation, saw it as a step toward building an alternative to armed conflict.
Since its founding, the Fulbright Program has become the U.S. government’s premier scholarship program. Coordinated by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright Program has supported nearly 280,000 American students, artists and other professionals opportunities for study, research and international competence in more than 150 countries. Fulbright alumni have become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, CEOs, university presidents, professors and teachers. Thirty-six Fulbright alumni have earned Nobel Prizes.
