World Language Students Win Fulbright Scholarships
Ian Wicks of Fayetteville and Mikaela Rhodes of McKinney, Texas, both seniors at the University of Arkansas, have been awarded Fulbright Scholarships. Both students will be spending part of the 2016-17 academic year abroad teaching English as a foreign language. Wicks will be in Madrid, Spain and Rhodes will be in Germany.
We asked both of them how their experience learning a world language has helped them reach this point in their academic careers and how they intend to use these skills in the future. Here's what they had to say:
Ian Wicks
Studying a world language has certainly helped me in my academic career. I was able to have experience working with academic materials in another language... and learn from incredibly intelligent professors. Access to a whole other world of written documents means that I can learn all sorts of new things that I would never have known had I not developed my Spanish language skills.
Having experience with another language will undoubtedly help me in my professional endeavors. I hope to work for the U.S. State Department as a foreign service officer. If I decide to pursue a different career path outside of the foreign service, being able to speak Spanish will almost assuredly help me in the job market. I am interested in work with an international focus, and being bilingual will be a selling point for any sort of firm in the international arena.
Mikaela Rhodes
I believe that studying a world language has helped me immensely in my academic career. Because I majored in German and had in depth knowledge about the language, I could look at many primary sources in German and from Germany, which I utilized in my honors thesis. It helped me understand Germany's views on the matter from a direct source.
I believe that having another language will help me in my professional life. It has definitely been a talking point in interviews I have had. As the world continues to globalize, I think having another language will give me an advantage if I work for an international business, a non-profit, the government or any other organization.