Georgetown has been named a top-producing institution of Fulbright student scholarships for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Thirty-seven Hoyas who applied in October 2023 were selected for the Fulbright program in 23 countries for the 2024-2025 academic year. Throughout Georgetown’s history, more than 560 Hoyas have been granted a Fulbright student scholarship.
“We are very proud of our students who — through this recognition — are serving around the world and advancing cross-cultural connections. As a University committed to academic excellence and global engagement, Georgetown has a long history of producing Fulbright scholars,” said Georgetown Interim President Robert M. Groves.
Georgetown has been a consistent top producer of Fulbright scholars. In four of the last seven years, Georgetown produced the most Fulbright student scholars out of any college or university in the U.S.
“Georgetown’s Fulbrighters bring to life the university’s values of academic excellence, community in diversity and people for others as they live and work in host countries around the globe,” said Bill Cessato, deputy director of the Center for Research and Fellowships. “Their demonstrated commitment to their research, study and English teaching projects is inspiring, while nurturing the transformative cross-cultural collaborations that the Fulbright program celebrates.”
Alumni from six of Georgetown’s schools are represented in this year’s Fulbright class, including Hoyas from the College of Arts & Sciences, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, McDonough School of Business, School of Foreign Service, School of Continuing Studies and the School of Nursing.
Alexandra Meger (N’24) is also believed to be the first Georgetown-affiliated nursing major to be selected as a Fulbright student scholar since the federal program began almost 80 years ago. Meger is researching indigenous doula care in Brazil.
This year’s Fulbright student scholars also include Travis Richardson (C’15, G’27), a Georgetown Ph.D. linguistics student who is part of the inaugural cohort of the Fulbright-John Lewis Civil Rights Fellows. The fellowship, named after the civil rights activist and former congressman, is awarded to select Fulbright student scholars to promote studies, research and international exchange on nonviolent movements that promote civil rights.
Meet a few more of the Georgetown alumni currently abroad for their Fulbright program.
Connecting With Cultural Roots in Taiwan
Maximilian Goetz (SFS’24, B’24) has wanted to teach English in Asia since he was in middle school.
Teaching in Taiwan was the perfect fit for Goetz, who studied abroad at the National Taiwan University in 2022 and had several friends from Georgetown who were Fulbright scholars in Taiwan. Goetz said being in Taiwan also enables him to connect with his family’s cultural roots, as he has relatives in Taiwan and Taiwan has some cultural similarities with his mother’s home country of China.
“English is the language my parents use to communicate with each other even though it’s neither of their native languages,” Goetz said, referencing his mother, who grew up in China and his father, who grew up in Germany. “I definitely see English as a way to connect people, and that’s why I like teaching.”
As a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant, Goetz teaches some 400 middle school students across two schools in southern Taiwan. He said he avoids using the textbook and likes to have interactive lessons to encourage his students to speak, listen and expand their English skills.
Goetz loves to teach lessons on American culture. In his favorite lesson, he taught his students the history of Thanksgiving through a holiday-themed bingo game and had his students draw and reflect on what they were grateful for.
He hopes that by speaking Mandarin in the classroom, which he picked up from his mother and while studying abroad, the students will see the benefits of being bilingual.
“I think it’s powerful for students to see me speaking Chinese because it can provide [motivation,]” he said. “I often emphasize to students that if they can speak both English and Mandarin, they can communicate with nearly half of the world’s population.”
Goetz said Georgetown gave him the experience to thrive in a global environment. On the Hilltop, he majored in business and global affairs through the School of Foreign Service and McDonough School of Business, taking trips to the Dominican Republic, India and Ghana as part of his academic program.
“Georgetown opened my mind to thinking globally, both from a cultural communication standpoint and just having a global mindset and realizing the importance of connection in the global world,” he said. “I think Georgetown, with all the classes I took about global connection, motivates me to do my work. I know how important it is for people to cooperate across borders these days.”
Building Business Skills in Mexico
Unlike most Fulbright student scholars who teach English, take classes or conduct research, Elizabeth Hunt (SFS’24) has a different experience in the Fulbright program.
As part of the Binational Business Program, Hunt lives and works in Mexico City for a boutique financial consulting and investment banking firm.
Hunt studied abroad in Madrid, Spain, while at Georgetown and wanted to live abroad and develop her Spanish skills after graduating. In addition to her international politics major, she also minored in environmental studies and international business and completed several internships, including one at the State Department’s Bureau of Energy and Natural Resources, but wanted more concrete business experience.
“I wanted something that would further my career and help me learn new things but also be an out-of-the-box experience,” she said. “It was a combination of all my interests and the knowledge and opportunity Georgetown and living in DC gave me.”
At her firm Tactiv Asesores, Hunt works on capital fundraising projects and acquisitions in a variety of sectors, from the Mexican hotel industry to Spanish soccer teams. She also works with a client on a sustainable energy project.
In her Fulbright program, she also takes MBA classes at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, studying organizational behavior and microeconomics.
After her Fulbright, Hunt wants to pursue more career opportunities around sustainability in business while keeping the door open to finish her MBA in the future.
Hunt said her Georgetown education empowered her to think globally and take risks. She also credits the power of Georgetown’s alumni community after connecting with an alumnus who did the same Fulbright program in Mexico City and convinced her to take “a huge leap of faith.”
“Georgetown was super good about asking you to expand your worldview and getting you to think beyond the U.S.,” Hunt said. “I think Georgetown teaches you to be independent, take those risks and push yourself out of your comfort zone.”
Tapping Into Hungary’s Start-up Culture
Noah Aire’s (C’24) path to a research Fulbright scholarship in Hungary began at Georgetown. As a French major, he studied abroad twice in France and during his senior year conducted research with his French professor and the Massive Data Institute using natural language processing (NLP) to analyze French social media posts.
His research delved into NLP, or how computers understand and process human language.
Aire has always wanted to live in Hungary and learn its language because of his own Hungarian roots from his mother. During his Fulbright, he found a unique opportunity to pursue his professional goals while connecting with his own heritage.
“The Fulbright has allowed me to marry my professional desire to learn about startups with my personal desire to connect to my Hungarian family and heritage. I never thought I would be able to marry the two into one experience,” he said.
Aire researches how the Hungarian language is commercialized in Budapest’s startup ecosystem. In particular, he conducts interviews with educational technology startup founders, early-stage investors and Hungarian NLP developers to learn about the unique challenges the Hungarian startup ecosystem faces in the new era of large language models.
“Hungarian is known to be a morphologically complex language. That complexity coupled with the lack of resources funneled into Hungarian language products makes starting an NLP company extremely difficult as a founder in the Central and Eastern Europe region.” he said. “I am still rather new to NLP as a field so learning about it through Hungarian-specific challenges has shown me the unique issues that a lower-resource language faces when it comes to basic NLP tasks.”
When Aire arrived in Budapest, he attended networking events and interviewed startup founders, developers and investors about the local ecosystem and investing climate in Hungary related to NLP.
Aire connected with one start-up that welcomed him into their office every day to observe their operations and the challenges they face with their language-based products.
Aire credits Georgetown with giving him both the hard and soft skills to succeed in his Fulbright program. He said his business minor and the Baker Scholars Program — a program in the College for students interested in business for the common good — taught him everything he knows about business.
“Whether it’s understanding what’s important for an early-stage startup like traction, runway and burn-rate or using my linguistic background to understand morphology and the importance of training data, Georgetown helped me with the hard and soft skills I needed to jump into this research project.”
