Twenty-nine Dartmouth students and recent alumni have been awarded Fulbright grants this year, headed around the world to teach, conduct research, and pursue graduate study in fields ranging from public health to neuroscience to international relations. More than a third of them are students who have moved through the Dickey Center’s programs — a pattern that reflects what the Dickey Center sets out to do.
The Fulbright Program, established in 1946 and administered by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, was built on the premise that direct, sustained engagement across borders is how mutual understanding is made. That premise sits at the core of the Dickey Center’s own work. Whether through the Great Issues Scholars program, where first-year students first test their assumptions about the world against complex global problems; the War & Peace Fellows, who meet the practitioners shaping security and diplomacy at home and abroad; the Global Health Fellows, who pair classroom inquiry with service; or the Arctic Innovation Scholars, who examine the communities most affected by environmental change — the through-line is the same. We convene students with the people and questions that matter, and we connect their curiosity to the wider world.
This year’s recipients bear that out. Among them are Great Issues Scholars, War & Peace Fellows, Global Health Fellows, and an Arctic Innovation Scholar; students who built their own international internships and pursued global health placements abroad; and contributors to World Outlook, Dartmouth’s undergraduate journal of international affairs, and members of the Dartmouth Coalition for Global Health. Several have been part of more than one program over their four years — the kind of layered international engagement the Dickey Center is designed to make possible.
Of course, we here at the Dickey Center don’t claim credit for a Fulbright award; that belongs to the students who earned it and to the faculty and fellowships advisers across Dartmouth who guide them. But it is no accident that so many Dickey Center students go on to the Fulbright world. The habits the Fulbright Program rewards — intellectual seriousness about other places, a willingness to show up and listen with an open mind, a sense that understanding the world is work worth doing — are the habits the Dickey Center exists to cultivate. We are proud to see them carried abroad.
Read more about this year’s Dartmouth Fulbrights here.
