Three recent University graduates and three professors have been granted Fulbright Scholarships and will travel across seas to participate in an opportunity of a lifetime.
Recent graduates David Wegehaupt, Meaghan Geraghty and Paul Lajeunesse will represent Bowling Green as they venture off t o better themselves both academically and socially.
Wegehaupt, a native of Glendale, Ariz., will be traveling to Paris to study saxophone at the National Conservatory where he hopes to learn from great saxophone players.
“I had my mind set on studying in Paris and the Fulbright Scholarship has made that possible,” Wegehaupt said.
Meaghan Geraghty, of Austinburg, Ohio, will travel to Hong Kong where she will teach English.
“I wanted to get some international experience,” Geraghty said. “I love to teach so teaching English would be something right up my alley since I was an English Literature major.”
Paul Lajeunesse will spend his days studying landscape painting in Iceland.
“It’s my belief that the physical landscape directly affects how a society functions,” Lajeunesse said. “Iceland is extraordinary in terms of its physical geography as well as its society.”
BGSU faculty members David Jackson, John Fischer and Marc Simon will all depart for Eastern Europe in the near future.
“I wanted to go to Poland to teach somewhere different to see if I could succeed in teaching somewhere completely different than I’m used to,” Jackson said.
John Fischer will be heading to Poland as well, while Marc Simon will be teaching in Austria.
These BGSU alumni and faculty received six of approximately 6,000 new grants given out by the Fulbright program each year, adding up to $235 million.
The bill signed by Harry S. Truman in 1946, which was introduced by Senator J. William Fulbright, allowed Congress to create the scholarship.
“The Fulbright Program aims to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason and a little more compassion into world affairs, and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship,” Fulbright, who died in 1995, said.
