Two Members of the Class of 2009 Have Received Prestigious Fulbright Awards

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 13, 2009

RICHMOND, Ind. — Two recent Earlham College graduates will further their international education with Fulbright awards.

Erika Richter: The Earlham grad will use her Fulbright award to study in Finland.Erika Richter ’09 has been awarded a Fulbright grant to study at the Renvall Institute for Area and Culture Studies at the University of Helsinki and to conduct a research project in Finland. Thomas Stead ’09 has been awarded a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship in Indonesia.

“I think Earlham and Fulbright just seem to go together,” says Stead, a Sociology/Anthropology major. “Because of Earlham’s global mindset, the Fulbright is a natural next step.”

Richter will enroll as a visiting student at the University of Helsinki and conduct research for her project entitled “Colloquial References to Europe as a Reflection of Finnish National Identity.”

The Fulbright award allows her the opportunity to return to the country where she spent a year as a high school foreign exchange student.

“I fell in love with the country, people and language,” says Richter, a math major from Genoa, N.Y. “There’s something about it that speaks to me. As a whole the Finns are a somewhat introverted quiet people. They have tremendous respect for silence. The people there are very honest and up front.

“I will be back in the academic environment, mostly as a student, taking courses in language, history and culture, and we will see how it evolves from there.”

Thom Stead: He will teach English and perhaps photography during a teaching assistantship in Indonesia.The genesis of her Fulbright research project came during her stay as a foreign exchange student. Richter says she was startled and puzzled to hear Finns use the expression that they were “going to Europe” to describe their travel to Prague or Germany.

“While ongoing studies cover topics such as the idea of Europe and European identities as well as the international role of the European Union, there is little current research on how the Finns conceptualize Europe and whether or not they view themselves as Europeans,” Richter wrote in her application essay.

Stead will teach English to high school students in Indonesia for 20-25 hours per week, and he hopes to offer photography courses to interested students during the evenings and weekends.

“I got my first taste of teaching during my junior year on the Tanzania off-campus program when I had to teach 45 minutes of English to 200 students,” he says. “The experience was simultaneously terrifying and really fun.”

Stead says he has used photography as a creative outlet to express himself throughout high school and college and he hopes to be able pass along his skills and enthusiasm.

After completing the Fulbright, he plans to enroll in a transportation studies graduate program.

“In Indonesia there are lots of bikes and motor bikes or scooters,” he says. “I guess I will need to learn to ride a scooter.”

He first became interested in studying transportation while growing up in Cincinnati and riding for an hour or more on public buses to travel only four or five miles.

“With the concern for fuel efficiency and the economy today sometimes forcing people to move closer to where they work, it’s a great time to study transit systems,” he says.

This year some 7,000 students applied for the prestigious awards, which are administered by the U.S. Department of State. The total number of applicants was up 15 percent nationwide. Names for the late Sen. J. William Fulbright, the program is designed to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.” The Fulbright Program has provided more than 286,000 participants chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to share international concerns.

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Contact:
Mark Blackmon, director of media relations
765/983-1256 — E-Mail Mark