“They encouraged me to explore other cultures and the world around me,” said Gleason, who currently lives in San Francisco, after completing his master’s degree in international business practice in Bangkok, Thailand.

That encouragement and the global experiences he gained while at Wheaton and since graduating have led to Gleason being awarded a Fulbright Binational Business Grant.

The grants are awarded to students who are interested in combining coursework in international business or law with an internship at a Mexico-based company conducting international or legal business. The goal is to enhance knowledge, expertise and understanding of post-NAFTA Mexico.

For Gleason, who began learning Spanish at age 12 and double majored in Hispanic studies and international relations, the Fulbright opportunity draws upon all of the cultural knowledge he has gained and allows him to apply it in a real-world setting.

“Living and working in Mexico will tie together my lifelong study of Latin American culture with my postgraduate business studies and professional background,” says Gleason, a former resident of Dresden, Maine.

“My first experience abroad was a cultural immersion experience in Merida, Mexico. For two weeks, I lived with a host family, studied Spanish and explored the local culture. This experience awakened an urge to continue exploring other countries, and I studied abroad twice while at Wheaton—in Spain and in Argentina. I also worked for two summers in Turkey. After graduation, I accepted an internship in the UK, before moving to Thailand.”

Gleason says the Fulbright will allow him to build on his academic and professional work experience. “This would bridge the gap between my undergraduate and graduate studies. It would provide an outlet for me to apply my knowledge of culture, language and business strategy. I am eager to connect my work experience with the broad understanding of Latin culture I garnered from my education.”

His interest in international business is an organic extension of his studies in international relations, he notes. As a student at Wheaton, he said he was inspired to learn more about the world through his courses and motivated by a curiosity to understand the forces of diplomacy and political economy.

He enhanced his studies with internships and volunteer opportunities with internationally-oriented organizations.

While studying abroad, he volunteered as a location coordinator for L.I.F.E. Argentina, a nonprofit working with youths living in socially marginalized and extremely impoverished areas. He led a team of volunteers and designed and delivered social and educational programs, including after-school mentoring, tutoring and sports.

He also worked for two summers at an English language summer camp in Istanbul, Turkey. At the Robert College Summer Program, which is administered through the Filene Center, he introduced students to new ways to communicate in English through sports and the arts.

Professor Darlene Boroviak knew Gleason for the four years he was at Wheaton, was his advisor for his major in international relations, and has kept in touch with him.

“Padric has a broad, cosmopolitan view of the world, and he is clearly someone who wants to be engaged with that world,” she says. “He has an extensive understanding of international relations and the meaning of globalization.”

She agrees that the Fulbright as the right next step for him, given his goals.

Ten Wheaton students and recent graduates won Fulbright awards that will support of year of living, working and studying abroad, from Thailand and Indonesia to Estonia and Poland.

“This is an astounding achievement for each of our students, as well as for Wheaton,” said President Ronald A. Crutcher. “The number of Fulbrights awarded shows how dedicated students are in preparing—through their academic studies and through their broad range of experiences—for lives that have a global reach.

"The fact that our students continually win Fulbrights each year underscores the hard work and commitment of faculty and staff members who offer advice and guidance throughout the very competitive process.”

Wheaton continues to rank among the top 10 liberal arts colleges in the nation when it comes to preparing students to win Fulbright Scholarships for advanced study and work abroad, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Institute for International Education, which administers the Fulbright program.

Wheaton tied for ninth place in the number of students who received Fulbrights in 2011, sharing the spot with Bowdoin, Connecticut and Wellesley colleges, among others. Overall, Wheaton’s students have won 72 Fulbright awards from 1998 through 2012.

Wheaton students' success in winning national scholarships goes beyond the Fulbright to encompass a variety of other prestigious awards, including Rhodes, Marshall, Truman and Watson scholar awards. In fact, Wheaton students have won 18 competitive academic scholarships this year.

Professor of Political Science Jay Goodman wrote a 2010 article for the Wheaton Quarterly, Pathways to Success, that discusses the success of Wheaton students in winning competitive post-graduation scholarships.

"Though we were the instigators, we lost!" Morris reports.

The following year, the Tong lab won again, in a game of capture the flag. Finally, in 2010, Morris's team bounced back, with a win in kickball.

The rivalry game, which this year was croquet, has become such an event that alums come from all over the state to participate.

Photos by Keith Nordstrom

“I was inspired to create my own languages and study as many others as possible, both real and constructed,” Antetomaso recalls. “I experimented with learning ASL, Esperanto, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Klingon, Korean, Latin, and even Xhosa. Language created a doorway between worlds, allowing me to step through into completely different cultures.”

A doorway to another new culture will open for Antetomaso this fall, when she heads to the Republic of Estonia as a Fulbright Scholar. The Wheaton College senior from Woburn, Mass., a double major in linguistics and Russian studies, plans to study and conduct research on language at the University of Tartu.

Antetomaso developed an interest in linguistics as a high school student, when she took a course in the subject at MIT. She chose Wheaton in part for its wide offerings in world languages, though she knew the college had no linguistics major. Then a friend told her about an English professor, Michael Drout, who “was always talking about linguistics in class.”

“On a whim I went to talk with him," she says, "and he was really supportive of the idea” of developing an independent major in linguistics.

With Drout’s guidance, Antetomaso built the major with courses from several departments—English, Computer Science, Psychology and Anthropology—plus linguistics courses at Brown University.

The University of Tartu, where she will work and study, is one of the world’s foremost centers for linguistics research, and its Department of Estonian Language Studies is the leading department of its kind. Antetomaso is intrigued by Estonian, which, like Finnish and Hungarian, is a Finno-Ugric language.

“These languages are significantly different from most other European languages,” says Antetomaso. “They are generally agglutinative languages, which means that things like tense, number, location and speaker can be indicated by an ending tacked onto the word.” (For instance, in Finnish, “istua” means “to sit down,” while “istahtaisinkohan” means “I wonder if I should sit down for a while.”)

In her Fulbright research, Antetomaso will employ natural-language processing, a technique that uses computers to process, understand, and output human language and which has applications to technology such as speech-recognition software, text-to-speech programs and machine translation. Antetomoso will examine how English-based language-processing algorithms work on Estonian texts, and vice versa, with the goals of studying the structural differences between the two languages and also developing “language-independent” algorithms.

“I’ve worked with a lot of language-processing tools at Wheaton,” she says, “tools that cluster similar texts, or parse speech into phonemes, but these tools all presuppose that you’re using them on English data sets.” Language-independent algorithms, on the other hand, are universal; they work with many different languages.

Antetomaso’s studies at Wheaton have opened up many other opportunities. She attended the European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information in Copenhagen and has worked for two years as a research assistant to Professor Tom Armstrong (Computer Science). In 2011 the pair co-authored a paper and presented it at the International Conference on Development and Learning in Frankfurt, Germany. Antetomaso also completed a senior honor’s thesis based on her own linguistics research.

Juniors Jessica Restrepo and Alexander Herbert are among nine students who will be working and learning abroad this summer through the support of the Davis International Fellows Program, which is administered by Career Services at the Filene Center.

The Davis International Fellows Program, established in 1994 through an endowed gift from the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, is designed to help students undertake educationally meaningful international experiences that link to academic or career interests.

Recipients receive a $5,000 stipend to support experiences of 6-8 weeks during the summer break. The award may be used to cover travel and living expenses as well as any preparatory costs, such as immunizations, passport and visa fees.

This year's Davis International Fellows are:

• Chelsea Ettinger ’14, a biology major from San Francisco, Calif., will participate in a clinical intnership through Child Family Health International, a health care service-learning program in Quito, Ecuador.
• Benjamin Fagan ’13, an international relations major from Westport, Conn., will work as a writer and editorial assistant for the English-language magazine, Bolivian Express, which is based in La Paz, Bolivia.
• Alexander Herbert ’13, a history & Russian studies major from Attleboro, Mass., will assist in the cataloging of books in the collection of the State Historical Museum in Moscow, Russia.
• Nanako Ota ’13, an anthropology major from Tokyo, will work as an intern for the Gross National Happiness Commission in Thimpu, Bhutan.
• Lindsay Powell ’13, a sociology major from Brooklyn, N.Y., will write reports on proceedings of the South African Parliament for the Parliamentary Monitoring Group, a non-profit, governmental organization in Capetown, South Africa.
• Jessica Restrepo ’13, a chemistry major from Denver, Colo., will intern with the Kantipur Dental Hospital, a teaching hospital and research center located in Kathmandu, Nepal.
• Juan Riano ’14, a major in anthropology and in international relations from Bogota, Columbia, will help to implement a program of public health and environmental workshops in Andean agricultural communities with the Center for Social Well Being, which is based in Lima, Peru.
• Kat Ullrich ’14, an anthropology major and chemistry minor from Simi Valley, Calif., will volunteer with health care workers in Guatemala.
• Michelle Van Akin ’13, a major in anthropology and international relations, will write grant proposals for Orphelins Sida International, a Paris-based non-profit organization that assists African children who have been orphaned due to the AIDS epidemic.

“@Ava290 @AlPalz87 so both meaning AND gender are social constructs? #Eng290.”

“@corinne_manning @Ava290 Yeah I would say so!”

These are just a few tweets posted between students during a Tuesday morning session of  English 290: Approaches to Literature and Culture. Twitter—the short-form online social networking service—is not considered a distraction in Professor of English Paula Krebs’ classroom. In fact, she requires students to regularly write and respond to tweets as a way to engage with assigned readings and class discussions.

English 290 introduces students to literary and cultural theories, as well as topics such as authorship, readership, and cultural consumption. For Krebs, who has taught the course for 20 years, the idea of blending cutting-edge “web 2.0” technology with scholarship seemed like an effective way to foster robust learning inside and outside of the classroom.

“I wanted to make the class more interactive and less about a lecture from the front of the room,” said Krebs. To ease students into this new approach, she told them “to just tweet about what they found interesting.”

What I love about the course is that it defies the traditional boundaries.... —Andrew Dominello '14Krebs didn’t stop at Twitter in order to integrate new technology. An Academic Technology Funds grant from Wheaton enabled her to provide each of her 20 students with a Kindle e-Reader. Early in the semester, students read Coraline (a contemporary children’s book) three times using a Kindle, a physical book, and an audio book. They then blogged about how they approached reading using each medium, and how their consumption of the text differed each time.

Inside the classroom, Krebs uses a projector to show course texts and the live stream of the class’ Twitter hashtag, #Eng290. Hashtags are commonly used on Twitter to organize tweets by subject, and Krebs has found that implementing one for this course has led to “real records of what happens during classes” that serve a similar purpose as traditional class notes.

Many of Krebs’ students had never used Twitter before taking English 290. Though the experience has been rewarding for some and challenging for others, students recognize how innovative the tool can be for academic collaboration and exploration.

“At first, I was pretty skeptical about using Twitter in the classroom and I’m still getting used to it,” said Montana Rogers ’14, but she noted that, “it offers opportunities for shy people to speak out and have their thoughts heard.”

Andrew Dominello ’14 has found classroom tweeting to be “remarkably ahead of the curve,” and he believes the course’s focus on technology accurately reflects the rapidly evolving literary industry.

“What I love about the course is that it defies the traditional boundaries that many students and even faculty members believe are designated to English classes,” he said. “I’m a traditional reader, and I like to have a hardcover book in my hands. However, Professor Krebs has opened our minds to technology’s possibilities and prevalence in society. She encourages us to use a radical change that is so daunting to our advantage.”

—Adara Meyers '08

When she was 14, Fisher traveled to China with her mother and fell under the country's spell. She returned there last year as a Wheaton College student to spend the year studying and working as a student teacher.

After she graduates from Wheaton this spring, Fisher will head back to Asia as a Fulbright Scholar to Taiwan where she will teach English and immerse herself in its culture.

"What fascinates me about Taiwan and Taiwanese culture is how it’s a conglomeration of multiple cultures: Chinese (from many very different regions), Japanese, American, and aboriginal Taiwanese," Fisher said. "I think this makes for a very interesting mix of cultural practices.

"I am particularly drawn to the politics of identity and how education and history are involved in the making of identity," she said.

The New Orleans native says her desire to live and work in Asia began with the journey she took with her mother. "By the end of our trip, I did not want to leave. Back in the U.S., I delved into books about the history and culture of Chinese people," she said.

The Anthropology major pursued her interest in the region through a minor in Asian Studies with a concentration in Chinese history. She also studied Mandarin for three years.

During her junior year, Fisher studied Chinese culture and ethnic minorities at Yunnan Minorities University in Kunming and then moved on to Shanxi Normal University in Xi'an, where she studied Chinese history, particularly the Silk Road and globalization. While in China, she also spent the summer teaching English.

The most memorable moment of the year, however, arose from an impromptu trip she and a friend took into rural Sichuan on the eve of the Chinese New Year. The pair climbed aboard the train with no place to spend the night. "Within fifteen minutes, we had an invitation to stay with someone," she said. "We ended up with a room for the night and experiences that I wouldn’t trade for the world-–making glutinous rice balls with the family we were staying with, eating meals with them, setting off fireworks in the street, and lighting incense at a Buddhist temple to usher in the New Year."

On campus, Fisher also followed her interests in culture and Asia by participating in the Asian American Coalition and the Anthropology Club and by serving as a Study Abroad Peer Advisor.

Her most important experiences occurred in the classroom, however. "The skills that I have gained in classes at Wheaton are what I think will be most helpful," Fisher said. "Particularly in my Anthropology classes, I have learned how to get a good understanding of group dynamics and exercise cultural sensitivity. These skills will be very useful when it comes to creating lesson plans that will best engage my students and address their specific needs, as well as collaborating with other teachers and staff."

The French Studies major and Education minor has won a French Government Teaching Assistantship, and she will be teaching English to secondary school students at the Académie de Paris.

"I am excited by the opportunity to teach about American culture and in return learn from my French students," said Hanson, who intends to pursue a career in education when she returns to the U.S."The French language is my passion, and I plan to share my experiences abroad with my future American students when I return to the United States."

The native of Darien, Conn., says that she is particularly fascinated with the intertwining of French fashion and history with its culture.

"Appearance is a critical part of the French way of life, even to the detail of how one cuts Camembert cheese," she said. "France’s artistic and architectural beauty reflects its culture, which dates back hundreds of years.

"Paris has a rich history – the Haussmann buildings, the bouquinistes along the Seine, the museums and the magnificent churches all tell stories about France’s past," she said.

In addition to her familiarity with French language and culture, Hanson also has developed her skills as a teacher. "Currently I am student teaching French at Norton High School," she said. "I love seeing my students’ faces light up once they finally grasp a concept, and I love seeing their passion for French growing as I am teaching them."

Hanson credits Wheaton with helping her to build the skills to overcome challenges, "I have learned the life lesson that one can never give up, even if you hit a roadblock," she said. "Perseverance is the key."