Katrina Fjeld, a graduating senior in International Affairs and Arabic, is WKU’s first Fulbright US Student Program grantee of the 2024-25 award year. Katrina has been awarded an English Teaching Assistantship for Jordan. 

The Fulbright US Student Program offers full funding for graduating seniors and recent graduates to spend an academic year abroad in English Teaching Assistantships (ETAs) or conducting research or creative projects that may or may not be part of a postgraduate degree program.  

Katrina is a native of Bowling Green, the daughter of LaNett and Richard Ivey, and a graduate of Greenwood High School. In May, she will become a first-generation college graduate with a degree in International Affairs and Arabic. She is a member of the Mahurin Honors College, in which she has served as a Peer Mentor for three years. 

Katrina’s profound commitment to public service and curiosity about the world has been a throughline in her experience. After serving in JROTC in high school, she began exploring foreign service options at WKU. After working with the Office of Scholar Development to apply for the highly competitive Rangel Summer Enrichment Program after her first year, she was selected and spent the summer in sessions—virtual, due to COVID restrictions—exploring a world of opportunities in international affairs. 

“The other participants and I were all in the same field but coming in with such different interests,” Katrina says of the experience. “It really expanded my ideas of what you could do abroad. I had started learning Arabic and began to realize I wanted to spend a lot of time with people in Arabic-speaking cultures.” 

After the Rangel Summer, Katrina went directly into a semester-long study abroad in Jordan. Although she made meaningful connections with people in the community, especially through an internship with an organization that serves refugee women in Amman, her options for community engagement were again limited by COVID protocols. 

When asked what she is most looking forward to about being a Fulbrighter in Jordan, Katrina said, “I feel like I got ‘Jordanian-lite’ experience last time. I’m excited to have the full cultural experience this time, especially because my vocabulary has grown so much. I’ll get to have so many more conversations about more complicated things with people in my community.” 

Fulbright English Teaching Assistantships vary considerably from country to country; ETAs can work with students from elementary to university age, on campus and in the community, and serve as assistants or independent teachers in any of approximately 70 countries around the world. In Jordan, ETAs assistant-teach English and American culture in secondary-school and university classrooms and are expected to have two years of teaching experience by the beginning of the grant period. Katrina’s experience is nontraditional: peer mentorship, volunteer-teaching English to refugee women, and a year and a half of teaching psychological skills workshops for children and adolescents at Rivendell Behavioral Health Hospital. However, it speaks to Katrina’s commitment to education in the big picture. 

“For me, teaching is really about getting people to care about something enough to learn, and me caring enough to help them make progress,” she said. “I am really looking forward to trying out teaching in a foreign classroom, not only to help them learn English and learn more about the United States, but so I can learn more about what their society and the world looks like to them.” 

Katrina has been engaging with these questions through public opinion research with Dr. Timothy Rich in the Department of Political Science and has published several articles emanating from that research since 2021. 

“What I love about research is how it pushes me to ask more questions, to explore more resources, and to think more about how other people experience the world,” she said. “I love being surprised and saying, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. Why is it like that?’” 

After spending the 2024-25 academic year in Jordan, Katrina hopes to return with more ideas about what’s possible and more clarity about her next steps. She plans to pursue a career in public service with international dimensions. Whether her pathway includes law school or graduate school, she knows she wants to stay curious about the world and work on the crisis affecting refugees and their host countries in the Middle East. 

The Fulbright US Student Program is a good fit for graduating seniors and recent graduates with a record of involvement on campus or in the community, experience relevant to teaching or research, and a desire to spend a year abroad. Students and recent alumni interested in the program are encouraged to contact Melinda Grimsley, WKU’s Fulbright Program Advisor.  

About the Fulbright Program: The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The primary source of funding for the Fulbright Program is an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Participating governments, host institutions, corporations, and foundations in foreign countries and in the United States also provide direct and indirect support. Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields.The Program operates in over 160 countries worldwide. 

About the Office of Scholar Development: The Office of Scholar Development mentors students applying for national scholarships to fund “academic extras” such as study abroad, research, professional experience, and more. From first drafts to final submissions with multiple revisions in between, OSD helps students make more possible. By conceptualizing and revising the stories they tell in application essays and interviews, students better understand their strengths, interests, and purpose—and explore multiple possible pathways to that work.