Two Penn students were accepted into the Fulbright United Kingdom Summer Institutes last month, where they will study the country’s history and heritage.
This summer, rising College juniors Demi Egunjobi and Eshaal Ubaid will attend the University of Bristol and King’s College London, respectively. According to Rowena Boddington, interim executive director of the US-UK Fulbright Commission, students were selected for their intellectual curiosity, leadership, community involvement, and transatlantic engagement.
“Through immersive academic and cultural experiences, they will deepen their knowledge while building lasting connections,” Boddington wrote to The Daily Pennsylvanian.
The Fulbright UK Summer Institutes seek U.S. students with at least two years of undergraduate study remaining and little to no travel experience outside of North America. Funded by the Fulbright Commission, the program covers costs of tuition, airfare, and social programming.
Egunjobi studies health and societies at Penn and will explore arts, activism, and social justice this summer. In an interview with the DP, she explained that her interest in the program stems from a passion for activism.
“I care a lot about student empowerment, student rights, and advocacy,” Egunjobi said. “I want to see how people approach activism and advocacy in a completely different environment.”
Previously, Egunjobi has worked with nonprofits and engaged in policy work such as walkouts, school curriculum changes, and participatory budgeting.
Egunjobi told the DP that she saw similarities between Bristol and her hometown of Providence, R.I.
“There’s the spirit of activism, togetherness, and community — and a willingness to create change for the community,” Egunjobi said. “I saw that a lot in Bristol, in terms of how they approached advocacy through protests with the 2020 George Floyd and racial reckoning, even though they don’t have that big of a Black population.”
Ubaid is studying entrepreneurship, medicine, and international affairs at Penn. She will take the courses “Modern Britain: Institutions, Power, and People” and “Critical Approaches to Sustainability and Development” this summer.
In an interview with the DP, Ubaid said her interest in the program stemmed from a “goal in life to discover how wrong I am about everything.” Particularly, Ubaid expressed a desire to travel and encounter “as many new things as possible” and ultimately make things “better in a kind of revolutionary way.”
“You can’t really do that without first seeing what the world has to offer because you don’t know what bubbles and echo chambers you’re in until you’ve left them,” she explained.
Ubaid chose King’s College because she “wanted to see what life was like in a city outside the United States” within a country that “takes things like climate change a bit more seriously.”
Currently, Ubaid works at a startup which makes future planning more accessible to low-income students and addresses institutional inequities.
“I like thinking about how not just places, but institutions in countries expand and attain influence over time — and what it takes to change those institutions,” Ubaid said. “I want to change at least the institution of health care for the better and even beyond that.”
According to Walter Lohmann — associate director for fellowships at the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships — CURF supports students interested in opportunities like the Fulbright program “with one-on-one advising, essay draft reviews, and interview preparation.”
“They are fantastic opportunities to learn and grow in a challenging but supportive environment, and CURF staff enjoys supporting students in pursuing these meaningful experiences,” Lohmann wrote to the DP.
