<ond round of Fulbright Scholars have been announced, bringing the total of Carleton recipients to seven seniors. Brian Kilgour, Lydia Jackson and Noah Randolph-Flagg have been awarded the prestigious scholarship for the 2011-2012 year.
The Fulbright Scholarship Program provides the opportunity for students to study, teach and conduct research across the globe, in over 155 countries. This year, 37 Carleton students applied for the Fulbright Scholars Program; 17 seniors made it to the final round and seven were granted the scholarship.
Kilgour, a Political Science/ IR and Russian double major, will use his Fulbright to travel to southern Siberia and study the affects of tourism in the area. “I will be going to Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Republic of Buryatia,” said Kilgour. “[I will] research how tourism has developed in the area and how that development has affected the local ethnic community, the Buryat.” He will be traveling around the area to conduct his research, exploring the tourist industry in remote areas in addition to cities. He also plans to take classes in Buryatian history and learn some elementary Buryat language at the local university. After his Fulbright experience, “I plan to join the US Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer,” explained Kilgour. “The Fulbright will give me valuable research experience, knowledge of an area of the world rarely visited by Americans, and an early experience of representing the US abroad.”
Jackson, an Asian Studies major, will go to Kaohsiung, Taiwan and teach English to middle school aged children for 11 months. She will be an apprentice to an English teacher and get first hand experience in a classroom. At some point she might even get her own supplementary classroom to run. “It’ll be so the kids have a native English speaker so they can get used to hearing people speaking it,” she explained. Jackson, who has been taking Chinese since high school, wants to incorporate her Chinese language skills into what she does post-Carleton.
Randolph-Flagg, a Geology major, plans on going to central China and to study the effects of climate change on water resources. For the first 15 weeks of the program, he will attend a 15-week language camp, during which he can’t speak any English, to brush up on his Chinese. He will then head to Xibei University in Xian, China, to work with local scientists and scientists from UC Berkeley, conducting his primary research about climate change. “I’ll be doing computer models on already published data, to come up with graphical representations of climate change on the local water resources,” Radolph-Flagg said. “[China] is an interesting place that has science that affects millions and millions of people.” After his Fulbright time, Randolph-Flagg will go to graduate school at UC Berkeley, where he is deferring a year, to study geophysics. “I will hopefully be able to publish a paper based on my research done in China,” he said.