PSU students awarded Fulbright grants

When Sarah Taylor received the email informing her that she’d won a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to teach in Germany, the 23-year-old—an applied linguistics and German major—struggled to speak. 

 “I turned and said ‘Ful…Fulbright! They emailed me,'” Taylor said. Immediately after, she called her grandmother in Dallas, Ore., to tell her the good news.

This year, Taylor is one of three students from Portland State that have been awarded the Fulbright scholarship, an international scholars exchange program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, to work and conduct research overseas next year.

Students Erica Charves and Julia Ruppell are recipients of the Full Grants for study/research and Taylor is the recipient of the Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship program. 

Considered to be one of the most prestigious programs in the U.S., the Fulbright program will pay for the students to spend 10 months overseas.

Applied linguistics Professor Keith Walter, who has worked with Taylor before, said Fulbright recipients serve as U.S. ambassadors.

“The best candidate is someone who is willing to think from an international perspective,” Walter said.

Since Fulbright emphasizes students’ involvement in the international community, all three students have studied or worked overseas before. For Taylor, her study-abroad trip to Tübingen, Germany, made her fall in love with German culture.

This coming fall, Taylor will work as a foreign language assistant, teaching English to high school students in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Taylor said it feels “just right” to receive the grant, after having been involved with University Studies as a peer mentor for two years.

Like Taylor, Charves has been involved in mentoring and leadership roles at PSU through her work with the Muslim Student Association. Her trip to the United Arab Emirates in winter 2008 inspired her to study women’s participation and leadership in urban planning and sustainability.

Learning how Arab women negotiate and get involved in the local communities and in the political arena is an important topic, she said.

“They have the same aspirations and desire [as American women] to change their community,” Charves said. “I’m interested in looking at the barriers that could prevent them from leadership roles.”

Charves will graduate with a degree in community development and communication this June.

Ruppell, a Ph.D. candidate studying biology, said she was unsure whether her proposal to study white-crested gibbons in Laos would be approved, since most Fulbright-funded research focuses on culture and language. 

After she graduated from the University of Rhode Island in 2004 with a degree in anthropology and psychology, Ruppell traveled to Thailand and Cambodia. It was through her work with a gibbon sanctuary in Thailand that she discovered her interest in studying the endangered species.

“I realize there hasn’t been a lot of an ecological study done on this species,” Ruppell said.

Ruppell has received several grants for her research before, including an $8,000 grant from the Oregon Zoo and a $3,000 grant from the Climate Action Fund. With the Fulbright scholarship, she will travel to Laos to collect data and partner with the National University of Laos for her project.

The Fulbright program has also awarded grants to environmental sciences and management Professor Jeff Gerwing and community health Professor Mark Kaplan. Gerwing will travel to Bangalore, India, in October to study local forest management techniques, while Kaplan will study community health in Sweden. ?