Elmhurst College Senior Named Fulbright Student

ELMHURST, IL — Elmhurst College senior Isabel Juvan has been named a 2017 Fulbright U.S. Student. According to a release, the award provides a grant that will enable her to travel this fall to the Slovak Republic, where she will work as an English teaching assistant for the next year.

“It’s still kind of a shock,” Juvan, an English and secondary education major from Elmhurst, said in a release.

The school said she is the sixth Elmhurst College student to have won the award from the highly competitive Fulbright U.S. Student program, and was one of two Elmhurst seniors to be named a semi-finalist—the first time two students have achieved that distinction in the same year in the Fulbright program.

The Fulbright English Teaching Assistant program places students in classrooms across the world to assist local English language teachers and to serve as cultural ambassadors for the U.S. To succeed, students need excellent grades, experience studying abroad, community or campus involvement and excellent interpersonal skills, Mary Kay Mulvaney, an English professor who is director of the Honors Program and the College’s Fulbright Program adviser, said in a release.

The school said Juvan, a York High School graduate, will graduate from Elmhurst College on May 27 as an Honors Program Global Scholar, the highest distinction in an already rigorous academic program. She spent the spring of 2014 studying abroad, at Oxford University’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

“It was a tremendous experience,” she said in a release. “I knew once I came home I wanted to go abroad again.”

In the Fulbright program, Juvan will teach at a high school in Preŝov, on the eastern side of the Slovak Republic.

“She is a very deserving candidate and a wonderful young woman who has really maximized her opportunities at Elmhurst, and I couldn’t be prouder of her,” Mulvaney said in a release.