Wesleyan Recognized as a Top Producer of Fulbright U.S. Students

For the third year in a row, Wesleyan University was named a Fulbright U.S. Student Program Top Producing Institution for the 2021-2022 academic year.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the largest U.S. exchange program offering opportunities for students and young professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and primary and secondary school teaching worldwide. The program currently awards approximately 2,000 grants annually in all fields of study and operates in more than 140 countries worldwide.

In 2021-22, 28 Wesleyan students and recent alumni applied for the fellowship. Of those, Ji Yoon Park ’21 and Lupita Sanchez ’20, MA ’21 received Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Awards, and Susannah Greenblatt ’16, Mira Guth ’18, and David Vizgan ’21 won Fulbright Study/Research Awards.

“The University is extremely proud of these five graduates,” said Wesleyan President Michael Roth ’78. “Fulbright recipients are known to foster mutual understanding, share knowledge across communities, and improve lives around the world. We are proud that our young alumni are representing Wesleyan and the United States as cultural ambassadors through the Fulbright Program.”

The Fulbright Program, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2021, is administered at Wesleyan through the Fries Center for Global Studies. Wesleyan has a strong track record of being a “top-producing institution.” Since 2004, the University has made the list 15 times.

Since its inception in 1946, more than 400,000 people from all backgrounds—recent university graduates, teachers, scientists and researchers, artists, and more—have participated in the Fulbright Program and returned to their home countries with an expanded worldview, a deep appreciation for their host country and its people, and a new network of colleagues and friends.

“We congratulate the colleges and universities we are honoring as 2021-2022 Fulbright Top Producing Institutions and are especially delighted to celebrate the institutions that achieved this distinction for the first time this year,” said Ethan Rosenzweig, deputy assistant secretary of state for Academic Programs in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. “We thank the leadership of these institutions for supporting their faculty advisors and administrators, who are instrumental in guiding their students through the Fulbright application process. We know that U.S. institutions benefit from having their students represent their campus overseas, which often fosters reciprocal exchanges that in turn help further internationalize U.S. campuses.”

Fulbright alumni work to make a positive impact on their communities, sectors, and the world and have included 40 heads of state or government, 61 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 76 MacArthur Fellows, and countless leaders and changemakers who carry forward the Fulbright mission of enhancing mutual understanding. For more information, visit the Fulbright Program’s website.