Six Students Tapped for Fulbright Scholarship

Posted on July 2, 2007

Six UNC students have been chosen to receive 2007-08 Fulbright Scholarships, enabling them to participate in the largest international exchange program in the country. The program allows students, scholars and professionals to study, teach or research personally chosen topics in more than 155 countries.

The six UNC Fulbright awardees, in addition to two who have been waitlisted, and their projects include:

• >Christine Boyle of Seattle, a doctoral candidate in city and regional planning who will research northern China’s irrigation systems. She hopes to use her findings to increase farmers’ influence on irrigation policy planning.
• Faith Cable ’07 (MRP) of Minneapolis, Minn. She will research a comparative analysis of sustainable development projects in Germany and the U.S.
• Ashley Carse of Montana, a doctoral candidate in anthropology who will research human-environmental problems in the Panama Canal Watershed from an ethnographic and historical perspective.
• Vernon Cathcart ’07 of Charlotte, who majored in sociology and who plans to teach English as a second language in South Korea while researching homosexual social experiences in Korea. His research will focus on the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality and the challenges these identities present to traditional Korean culture.
• Jennifer Cimaglia ’07 of Suwanee, Ga., who majored in classical archeology and anthropology major. She plans to explore Roman archaeology in Bulgaria. Her research will focus on cultural exchanges in the eastern Roman Empire. Cimaglia was a National Merit Scholarship recipient and a Morehead-Cain Scholar at UNC.
• Jessica Long ’06 of Durham, an ecology major who will participate in an internship with Project SICREL (System for Conservation, Region Loreto). Long was a Morehead-Cain Scholar at UNC and also a recipient of the Le Clair Award.

Joy Mischley ’07 (MSW) and Sara Vierra ’06 (MA) are alternate candidates for awards to India and Germany.

Established in 1946 by the U.S. State Department, the goal of the Fulbright Program is to increase understanding between people in the U.S. and other countries. Last year, the program awarded about 6,000 grants, totaling more than $235 million.

This year, there were 47 applicants from Carolina for the scholarship, said Beth-Ann Kutchma, UNC Fulbright program adviser. Last year, seven students received scholarships out of 31 applicants. “Every year they keep getting more and more applications,” Kutchma said. Since 1995, a total of 98 UNC students have received Fulbright awards.

Applicants must be graduating seniors, master’s and doctoral degree candidates or young professionals. In addition to an average GPA of 3.5 or above and a highly integrated campus experience, the Fulbright supports students who need to be in a foreign country to do their research and to have a cultural exchange, Kutchma said.

“Also, they want to know how Fulbright is going to affect their future,” she said. For example, factors such as if a student plans to go on to the Peace Corps or if the experience will allow him or her to become proficient in a foreign language make a strong application, she said.

“They are looking for somebody to have a new cultural experience.”

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