Last year, 2014 alumni Evan Gage and Emily Goodling were each awarded one of the most prestigious honors for undergraduates: The Fulbright scholarship.
Gage graduated from Hillsdale College with a double major in English and history and a religion minor. After basking in the beauty of Anatolia during a monthlong Hillsdale Honors Program trip the summer before, he applied for the J. William Fulbright Student Award — and got it.
Today, Gage lives in Tokat, Turkey, teaching and designing courses in English language and literature, and United States culture as part of his 10-month teaching assistantship. He teaches at Gaziosmanpaşa Üniversitesi, a well-known university nestled in Anatolia’s Black Sea region.
“Evan has exactly the right personality to do well as a Fulbright recipient,” Associate Professor of German and Hillsdale’s Fulbright adviser Fred Yaniga said. “Hillsdale is strong in providing what Fulbright looks for: A strong background in the liberal arts, someone who writes and speaks very well.”
A Fulbright scholarship was also offered to Goodling, a double major in German and classics. She declined the Fulbright award and accepted the German Academic Exchange Service, an equally-prestigious accolade that pays for Goodling to get a two-year graduate degree in comparative literature from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz — and provides funds for a living stipend, insurance coverage, and travel expenses.
“I’ve been in Germany for almost five months now; it’s hard to believe!” Goodling said in an email. “In so many ways it feels like home — I love the culture and the people and the language. At the same time, however, there are dozens of little things that remind me how foreign it all still is — like the fact that I can’t buy proper peanut butter anywhere.”
Goodling spent part of the summer working as an assistant for Hillsdale’s summer program in Würzburg — tutoring Hillsdale College students, sight-seeing in Germany, chatting about literature, and drinking wine in old cafés. For the rest of summer, she worked on a vegetable farm in Kulmbach, a tiny town near the border of Bavaria and the Czech Republic, where she felt at home cooking three meals a day for Bavarian farmers.
“The past few months, in the ends, have definitely made me realize the excellence of my Hillsdale education, and of the German department in particular,” she said in an email. “I can honestly say that I know very few foreign students here at the university who speak better German than the students in my graduating class last year. That’s something to be proud of.”
Yaniga said that he hopes current students will be encouraged by Gage and Goodling’s success and apply for the scholarship. Interested second-semester juniors should be in touch with him during the spring semester to discuss their applications.
“We’ve broken the ice. We had two Fulbright offers last year, and I think a lot more can follow,” he said. “Hillsdale students are equally qualified with the best students in the country. All of our applicants this year have made very strong proposals and I won’t be surprised if we have one or multiple winners.”
This year, six Hillsdale College seniors have applied for the Fulbright teaching assistantship in five respective countries: Ecuador, Guatemala, Luxembourg, Spain, and Turkey.
Caroline Green, a senior candidate who hopes to teach English in Spain, said that she thinks Hillsdale College students should apply for the Fulbright scholarship even if they don’t feel they have a good possibility of being accepted.
“You’re always going to have the chance to visit a foreign country but the cool part about the Fulbright program is that it allows you to be really involved in a country,” she said. “Fulbright integrates you into the culture. You have an opportunity to help train up a future generation of citizens and have a hand in what that country will look like in the future.”
