Where You At?

Prestigious Fulbright grants have taken four young alumni to Mexico, Uganda, Colombia, and Austria. Here’s what they’re doing.

These four grads are away on Fulbright fellowships this year working in business and social entrepreneurship, studying history, and teaching English. They’re in Mexico and Uganda, Austria and Colombia. Undergrad global study through SCU opened a few doors for them—as did fellowships through the Leavey School of Business and the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

KEYRA GALVAN ’15 is working in Mexico as a project lead for Nike’s Converse stores in that country while also taking MBA classes. She was a LEAD scholar at SCU—the first of her family to attend college. While studying economics and international business, she traveled to Turkey through the business school’s Global Fellows program to learn microfinance and market development. (As for Fulbright opportunities, she learned about those through a talk by Saayeli Mukherji ’13—whom a Fulbright took to the Netherlands.) Fluent in Spanish, Galvan hopes to build her fluency in Mexican business culture and international negotiations before returning to the Bay Area, where a position is waiting for her with Adobe.

TY VAN HERWEG ’15 is back in Uganda, where he first worked as Global Social Benefit Fellow for the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. His business fellowship will utilize the heavy reliance on mobile phones in Uganda to test a large-scale messaging app that connects merchants and distributors. The app is particularly designed for BanaPads—an award-winning social enterprise that makes women’s sanitary pads from banana stems. The company’s mission: Combat the high cost and stigma of female hygiene in Uganda. Van Herweg says that while on his GSBI fellowship, “I started noticing that distribution is a problem for all these global enterprises. Out of this I tried to think about how these things combine.”

JEFF MORAN ’04 is teaching English at the University of Cartagena in Colombia. He studied English and theatre as an undergrad before completing a master’s in teaching English to speakers of other languages. In Colombia he is also engaged in community work to help the poor. He has long been fascinated by Colombia’s history and remarkably diverse culture. In recent years Colombia has shaken off much of the troubles of left-wing insurgency, kidnappings, and drug cartels. The country’s population of 48 million is made up of descendants of native inhabitants, Spanish colonists, and African slaves, along with 20th-century immigrants from Europe and the Middle East.

JENNY KROMM ’13 returns to Vienna—a city she first studied in (and fell in love with) thanks to an SCU research travel award. Inspiration for her Fulbright came from a history class, War and Democracy: WWI in the UK. For her Fulbright in Vienna, Kromm, who is fluent in German, will be teaching English part time while researching the impact of censorship campaigns on the arts in the First World War. She says, “I’m interested in how different narratives affect how we perceive a historical event”—especially the shift into modernity. The arts are her medium as well as subject: Trumpet is the instrument for this player and music minor.