APPLETON, WIS. — For the third year in a row, a Lawrence University student has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English abroad.
Nicki Dabney, a senior from Silver Spring, Md., has been named a 2008-09 Fulbright Scholar and awarded a $15,500 fellowship. Beginning August 1, Dabney will spend 11 months in Taiwan, teaching English and serving as a cultural advisor at either an elementary or middle school in Gaoxiong, a port city of 1.5 million people in southwest Taiwan.
She is the seventh Lawrence student named a Fulbright Scholar since 2001 by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
Dabney, who will graduate in June with a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies, government and Chinese language and literature, spent a semester in Beijing in the fall of 2006 while on the Associated Colleges in China study-abroad program. Her experiences with daily Chinese life on that program prompted her to look for an opportunity to return to the Far East.
“I wanted to go back to either mainland China or a Chinese-speaking region to improve my language skills,” said Dabney, who is fluent in Mandarin. “I applied for the Fulbright Fellowship thinking it would be a great way to combine my language and teaching skills. It worked out perfect. It’s going to be a good challenge, but I’m excited and looking forward to it.”
For the past four months, Dabney has been teaching Chinese to students at Green Bay’s Aldo Leopold Elementary School. She also serves as an English as a Second Language tutor for Japanese students participating in the Waseda program, a study-abroad partnership between Lawrence and Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan that brings 15-20 Waseda students to Lawrence for a year of thematic and language study. She spent last summer as an intern for the China Program at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Ga., translating Chinese articles, writing media reports and analyzing Chinese news articles.
When her Fulbright appointment ends, Dabney hopes to pursue graduate studies in Asian languages and cultures.
“I eventually want to put my language skills to use in anything that improves cooperation between the United States and China and promotes cross-cultural exchange and understanding,” Dabney said.
Created by Congress in 1946 to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges, the Fulbright Program has become the U.S. government’s premier scholarship program. Since its founding, the Fulbright Program has supported study, research and teaching opportunities for nearly 280,000 American students, scholars and other professionals in more than 155 countries. Fulbright alumni have become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, CEOs, university presidents, professors and teachers. Thirty-six Fulbright alumni have earned Nobel Prizes.
