Two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate students and recent graduates were offered Fulbright grants to pursue international education, research and teaching experiences around the globe this coming year. The Fulbright U.S. Student Program builds international relationships to help solve global challenges. This flagship international educational exchange program of the U.S. government awards grants to students based on their academic and professional achievement as well as their ambassadorial skills and leadership potential. The Fulbright student program will fund more than 2,000 U.S. citizens to live abroad for the 2025-26 academic year.
David Miller, who grew up in Glencoe, Ill., and currently resides in Urbana, received his MFA in creative writing from Illinois this spring and will teach English in Romania. Miller’s professional goals include teaching at the university level, and he hopes to become a more well-rounded instructor through his Fulbright experience. He also plans to research his family’s Romanian history and use his immersion in the Romanian language as a launching point to translate the country’s rich trove of literature for English audiences.
Nadia Hernandez, a first-generation student from Crestwood, Ill., holds a bachelor’s degree in speech and hearing science and a master’s in clinical speech language pathology from Illinois. Hernandez plans to apply her experience working with students with special education needs — which she gained through graduate internships and professional roles as a SLP — as an English teacher in Spain, where equity and inclusion are prioritized in the classroom but the resources to support that mission are sometimes limited. Upon returning from her Fulbright experience, she plans to continue her work as a speech-language pathologist with a renewed focus on supporting bilingual students while working to attract diverse individuals into the SLP profession.
Read the full article posted by the University of Illinois News Bureau.