First, let me welcome you to the blog and explain the general idea behind it. When I studied abroad in Russia last summer, my main means of contact with people back home was through email. As I was writing to multiple parties and these emails inevitably contained a large amount of new events and experiences, it got to be a fairly time-consuming process. Furthermore, I know that an impromptu email forwarding chain came about through the efforts of my parents so that my extended family could stay informed of my exploits. To make things a bit more efficient and easier on everyone, I've conceived this blog as a means to keep interested parties informed of my exploits and whereabouts in the next academic year as I pursue a Fulbright grant in Russia. While there will be much more to come, I might as well give some additional info as to what exactly I'm doing and where I'll be doing it.
So what is the Fulbright Program? According to the website, which is much easier to quote than explain myself, "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 Fulbright Program is open to all sorts of people, including recent graduates, graduate students, university faculty, and others. My own grant is a special program within the Fulbright Student program, the English Teaching Assistantship. Essentially for the 2010-2011 academic year, I will be living in Russia and teaching English at a Russian university.
That university, as I've only recently learned, will be Petrozavodsk State University located in, as you can probably guess, Petrozavodsk, Russia. Petrozavodsk is located in the Republic of Karelia, in the extreme northwest of European Russia, only a few hundred kilometers from the border with Finland. I won't include too much more information on the city or the school now, as I'm planning on them devoting separate posts in the near future. For now, I'll just say that I'm very excited about my placement. Having studied in Siberia last summer, and given the excitement over this fact shown by the Russian Fulbright Officer that interviewed me, I was reasonably certain I would be stationed there again. While I did genuinely like living in Siberia, I wanted to experience another region of the country (and preferably one with slightly better access to necessities like internet). So I'm very excited to be stationed in the European north of Russia. It's an area with a lot of history and culture that I can't wait to experience firsthand. I'm still learning about Petrozavodsk, and as I do I'll be sure to share that information here. More to come!
