¾«¶«´«Ã½

¾«¶«´«Ã½ bachelor of music and world languages graduate Jennie Lee has accepted a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Award to spend 10 months teaching English in Germany.

But she won’t be your typical English teacher.

Building on the interests and activities she discovered at ¾«¶«´«Ã½ before graduating in 2016, she’ll teach English through extra-curricular activities like after-school yoga classes and singing lessons.

“I studied opera in college and got a degree in vocal performance and world languages,” says Lee, who came to ¾«¶«´«Ã½ from a traditional conservatory prep school background and earned a place in Pi Kappa Lambda, the musical honor society at ¾«¶«´«Ã½.

“The thing that drew me to ¾«¶«´«Ã½ is the ability to get conservatory style training – a super intense, really intense program where I would study arts and music – but also have the opportunity to double major, because I wanted to do that too and a lot of schools don’t offer that,” Lee adds. “That was a huge pull for me at ¾«¶«´«Ã½.”

Germany, which is home to one of the world’s leading-edge opera scenes, will offer a perfect place for Lee to continue her study of opera while also staying in touch with her new-found passion for world languages.

“German professor Gordon Birrell (in ¾«¶«´«Ã½’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences) really helped me with the Fulbright application and strongly encouraged me to pursue learning German while I was a student at ¾«¶«´«Ã½,” Lee says. “He would always support me and answered any questions I had with a lot of enthusiasm, so I think working with the entire world languages department really made me want to go abroad.”

Two other young alumni – Adam Garnick, M.Ed., and Kristen Biedermann, M.Ed. – also won Fulbright awards to teach abroad. Garnick will work in Hungary, and Biedermann will teach in Colombia.