It felt like just a few moments passed since I was staring at the statue of Dante in Piazza Santa Croce in Florence, Italy until I was curiously looking at the gates of the beautiful Sterling Library in New Haven.
Category: Europeans in the USA
Back to the Pack
It has been twenty-five years since I was a Fulbright Scholar at the North Carolina State University – home of the wolf pack! At the time, in what seems like a lifetime ago, my husband and I, both graduate scholars from newly independent Croatia went to Raleigh, NC. We were both at the beginning of our careers, eager and fortunate enough to be there.
It’s 4 AM on a Saturday in December and I’m anxiously maneuvering a little Hyundai out of a dark driveway in the Bay Area. I’m not a morning person, nor a great driver, and this all feels a bit adventurous. As with most things Californian, there’s an app involved, allowing me to rent a good neighbor’s car for the day to drive to Lake Tahoe, where I am eager to go skiing.
It has been 173 days and 18 hours ca. since I landed in the United States for my Fulbright-Shuman experience. Such an experience. I never expected that my “cultural ambassador” duties would have been so intense. But let’s say: an extreme pleasure. Luckily enough, my project on Privacy and profiling had me ended up at the MIT Media Lab, i.e. a melting pot of cultures, backgrounds, races, and minds from all over the world.
Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca – Roman Stoic Philosopher The Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca almost 2000 years ago described what the spirit of Fulbright simply is today: exchange of ideas, knowledge, culture in order to enhance vigor in our minds and our life. To receive […]
The Fulbright-Schuman Program offered me the extraordinary opportunity of working on my research project in California, collaborating with other researchers and students in one of the best cognitive science labs of the U.S., which has been very worthy for my professional career. I spent 5 months as a predoctoral visitor student in UC Merced researching […]
My visit to Columbia University is drawing to a close. The four months I have spent here have been an extraordinary period, and I’m grateful to Fulbright for making it possible. It is next to impossible to describe in detail all the highlights and opportunities that the program has granted me. As a visiting scholar […]
From The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You “I tell you what I will and don’t ask me why… I think life is a dream and what you dream I live” “Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, […]
A Taste of the Big Apple
Spending five months studying in New York was an enriching experience that challenged my idea of the United States. Before going into the nitty gritty of my experience, some background is needed as to why I decided to study in the US. Mid-way through the second year of my PhD in Law at the European […]
It has been now over a month that I left my ‘family’ at the KU Special Education Department in Lawrence, Kansas, and I cannot think of a better time to reflect back on what has been one of the most productive (and fun!) year of my academic and personal life. When I applied for the […]