Hilton's Catherine Shields Wins Fulbright Award

Geneseo, NY (05/30/2019) — Hilton, NY, native and Hilton High School graduate Catherine Shields has won a 2019-20 U.S. Student Fulbright award for Turkey to serve as an English Teaching Assistants in a university or post-secondary institution. Shields graduated from SUNY Geneseo in May with a double major in history and communication.

Earlier this year, Shields also won a U.S. State Department Critical Language Scholarship and will live in Azerbaijan this summer for an eight-week intensive course in university-level Turkish. When she returns to the U.S. after her Fulbright year, she plans to enter a master's degree program in Middle Eastern studies, exploring history and Islamic studies as well as Arabic and Farsi.

While at Geneseo, Shields worked as an English tutor with local migrant populations through St. Mary's Refugee Outreach Center in Rochester. In 2018, she interviewed dozens of Geneseo community members regarding 9/11 for the Voices in the War on Terror project.

SUNY Geneseo was recently named a Top Producer of U.S. Student Fulbright awards, the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announced in its annual article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Fulbright Program is the highly competitive flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and citizens of other countries. According to the U.S. State Department, Fulbrighters are considered cultural ambassadors who "interact with their hosts on a one-to-one basis in an atmosphere of openness, academic integrity, and intellectual freedom, thereby promoting mutual understanding."

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