Oxy's Fulbright Success Noted

October 18, 2006

Occidental College is one of the country's top producers of student Fulbright Awards, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education's new Fulbright rankings.

Occidental's four 2006-07 Fulbright winners means it ranks 16th among all liberal arts colleges in the country, according to recent data released by the Institute of International Education (IIE), which administers the Fulbright program for the U.S. Department of State. Occidental students have won a total of 16 Fulbrights over the past five years.

The IIE figures also show that on a per-capita basis, Occidental produced more Fulbright winners than larger institutions such as UCLA, Berkeley, Stanford, Michigan, and NYU.

The four current Fulbright awardees are Hailey Crowel '06 of Lahaina, Hawaii, a cum laude graduate in English and comparative literary studies, who is in Japan studying the role of technology on Japanese literary reading habits; Shana Khader '05 of Evergreen, Colorado, a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate in cognitive science and Spanish, who is teaching English in Argentina; Rebecca Shellock '06 of Whitehall, Penn., a college honors graduate in religious studies, who is conducting research in Austria; and Rachel Yamakawa '06 of Honolulu, Hawaii, a cum laude graduate in economics, who is teaching English in South Korea.

The four Fulbrights were only part of a long list of awards won by Occidental students during the 2005-06 academic year, including two Goldwater scholarships, three Taiwan scholarships, and Marshall, Truman, Coro and Strauss scholarships. In addition, Tiffany Ellis '03 was awarded one of 77 Jack Kent Cooke scholarships to pursue her graduate studies in visual anthropology at Oxford University.

Established by Congress in 1946, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program is considered the country's leading educational exchange program. This year, almost 1,300 American students in more than 100 fields of study were offered grants to study, teach English, and conduct research in more than 120 countries.