Hope College senior Emily Sicard of South Haven has received a highly competitive English teaching assistantship through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Through the assistantship, Sicard will spend the 2010-11 academic year teaching English in a bilingual program at a secondary school in Madrid, Spain.
Sicard is graduating with majors in English and Spanish. She spent the spring 2007 semester studying at the Autonomous University of Queretaro, Mexico, with which Hope has an on-going exchange relationship. Her activities while at Hope have included serving as an English as a Second Language instructor through Latin Americans United for Progress, clarinet section leader of the Wind Ensemble and a trip to Tijuana, Mexico with the spring break mission trip program. She is also a member of Sigma Delta Pi, the Spanish honor society, and received one of the society's scholarships last summer for a month of Spanish language study at La Universidad Internacional in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
She is a 2006 graduate of South Haven High School. She is the daughter of Walter and Kathleen Sicard of South Haven.
Fulbright grants are made to U.S. citizens and nationals of other countries for a variety of activities, primarily university lecturing, advanced research, graduate study, and teaching in elementary and secondary schools. Grant recipients include recent college graduates and graduate students, college and university instructors, and professionals in other fields.
The U.S. Student Program is designed for recent college graduates, master's and doctoral candidates, young professionals and artists, with awards supporting an academic year of study, research or teaching assistantship experience. The program operates in more than 144 countries worldwide.
Several Hope students or recent graduates have received the awards through the years, including four each in 2008 and 2009. Also this year, 2005 Hope graduate Daniel Kampsen received a Fulbright Student Program research award for his project "The Law of Public Protest in Poland and the United States: A Comparative Analysis." Kampsen, who is a 2009 graduate of Cleveland State University, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and is pursuing a Master of Science in Management degree with a focus on international business at Boston University, will spend 2010-11 in Poznan, Poland, affiliated with Adam Mickiewicz University.