Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

RICHMOND, Ind. — As favorable as their luck has been lately, Earlham grads Kjersti Knox and Garrett Bucks might have considered warm and sunny Monte Carlo — with its casinos — over of the labs and libraries of all-too-often cold and dark Scandinavia for their upcoming Fulbright Scholarship years abroad.

A biochemistry major at Earlham, Kjersti Knox says she hopes her upcoming Fulbright experience will help her to decide on one of two possible career paths — going to medical school or pursuing a Ph.D. in biology. Meanwhile, so busy the past two years with his responsibilities as a Teach for America associate, Garrett Bucks confesses he has “no idea” where his Fulbright studies might lead him. Although the Peace and Global Studies graduate says he expects to always be involved in the “quest for social change.”

Even now, as they prepare to leave for Sweden later this summer, the two members of Earlham’s Class of 2003 can hardly believe their mutual good fortune. Not only will their scholarships help Knox and Bucks to advance their academic careers, they also will allow the one-time college couple to revitalize a personal relationship interrupted by two years of after-graduation work in widely separate locations.

The two started dating during their last semester at Earlham, explains Bucks, a Peace and Global Studies major from Missoula, Mont., who is just completing a two-year assignment with the national service program Teach for America at the Navajo Nation school in Crown Point, N.M.

Following her graduation from Earlham, meanwhile, Knox — a biochemistry major from Pocatello, Idaho — spent a year teaching English on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe before returning to her interest in science via her current position as a technician in the University of Chicago’s microbiology lab.

“We’ve had to work hard at it,” Bucks says of the couple’s long-distance romance. “But, now it looks as though things are coming around well for us and I think we’re both very excited about the future.”

A combination of “crazy enthusiasm” and “crazy shock” is how Knox characterizes her excitement at the prospect of being a Fulbright Scholar; she will spend her year in Sweden studying public health concepts at the Karolinska Institute, the prestigious university that annually awards the Nobel Prize in medicine.

“I couldn’t believe it when I got the news,” says Knox. “I think I was on Cloud 9 for a couple of weeks. I know that a couple of times, going back and forth to work, I missed my bus stop because I was thinking about when I’d be leaving and what I’ll be doing. I still can’t believe it’s really happening. It’s pretty amazing.”

According to Bucks, who for his Fulbright project will examine Sweden’s aggressive international development program as a graduate student in a University of Stockholm program addressing globalization and social change, although he was first to find out about the twin Fulbright awards, it was Knox’s idea that the two apply for the highly competitive post-graduate research grants.

“I lived in Sweden for a couple of years and fell in love with it,” Knox says, elaborating that she first visited the country as a fifth grader, when her father, a physics professor at Idaho State University, spent a sabbatical there. Later, as a high school senior, she returned to Sweden as a foreign exchange student.

Those experiences, says Knox, left her not only fluent in Swedish, but also amenable to the supportive and interdisciplinary educational environment she would find eventually at Earlham.

“I think Earlham is the closest I ever got to Sweden in the United States, in terms of its ideas about community, about taking responsibility for ourselves and for other people around us,” Knox says. “Absolutely, it’s been a big part of my development process. The choices I made at Earlham contributed very much to my decision to apply for a Fulbright award. I did my foreign study in Cameroon, for example, because Earlham encourages that kind of participation hoping that it will open up just these kinds of opportunities.”

Beyond her personal affinity for the country, Knox says there also were some very practical considerations for selecting Sweden for her Fulbright studies — particularly, the Scandinavian nation’s many similarities to the United States.

Interested in examining the integration of complementary and alternative health care into contemporary health care systems, Knox could have taken advantage of her Fulbright scholarship to travel (as some friends and colleagues suggested) to China or Korea, Asian countries long experienced with complementary and alternative medical practices.

“But, long term, I wanted to make whatever I learn in my research applicable to the United States,” says Knox. “Sweden is a lot more like the U.S. in terms of culture, so I think by going there my project should have much more potential for when we get back.”

On the other hand, some of Sweden’s distinct differences from the United States, especially when it comes to public investment in improving the lives of impoverished people around the world, are what Bucks anticipates will make an interesting Fulbright experience for him.

“Sweden has this kind of national sense that it was spared during World War II, and so now I think there’s this feeling that’s developed that it should become sort of a beacon for the rest of the world,” says Bucks, adding that of all the world’s nations Sweden ranks among the highest for the amount of money — as a percentage of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) — given each year to the cause of international poverty alleviation.

“Few countries provide a better model for studying international development programs,” Bucks says. He notes that Sweden remains committed, in terms of its annual international aid budget and specific program initiatives, to the United Nations’ original goal of halving by 2007 the number of persons worldwide who live in poverty, even as most other countries and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the U.N. itself, have now pushed off achieving that goal to the year 2015.

“What can other powerful Western states learn from these programs?” asks Bucks, essentially bottom-lining his Fulbright proposal. “What responsibilities do nation states have within the global environment?”

The U.S. lags far behind in considering many possible inter-government and government/non-government combinations that might be put to work to effectively address the enormity of problems like global poverty, concludes Bucks.

“I hope to learn enough to help push us to a better understanding of the importance of these relationships,” Bucks says.

Contact:
Kevin Burke, director of media relations
765/983-1323 — E-Mail Kevin