Tag / fulbright scholar

by shannonchance

Transcontinental Collaboration: Voices of Fulbright Alumni

I’d like to share recent social media posts by my colleagues/past students/friends — their perspectives on transcontinental collaboration are unique and valuable! Thanks to Mia Dukuly, Violet Maufuwe, Tarrah Beebee, and Shinya Takehara for taking the time to reflect, document, and publicly share your experiences.

Tanzania

The first three of these — Mia, Violet, and Tarrah — participated as students in a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad that I led to Tanzania in 2005.

We spent five weeks in Dar es Salaam, studying alongside Tanzanian architecture students and teachers. Several of the students forged lifelong friendships (and some even marriages) with other members of our 63-person study group (25 students and teachers from the USA, 38 students and teachers from Tanzania).

I didn’t establish this blog (IrelandByChance.com) until 2012 (seven years after that trip, when I went on my own Fulbright fellowship to Ireland). Nevertheless, several of my past posts have mentioned aspects of that 2005 study abroad program:

Mia and Tara are two USA-based Fulbright alumnae who keep returning to East Africa — and sharing their adventures with others.

Here’s a taste of what Mia and her architect friend Violet Mafuwe have gotten up to recently:

A post shared by Mia Dukuly this past autumn.

Violet was one of the Tanzanian students participating in the 2005 study abroad program, and the only female among dozens of males.

The sisterly bond between these architects, Mia and Violet, is truly heartwarming.

Tarrah, Mia, and Violet are all actively engaged in social missions, continually reaching out and helping others, particularly vulnerable people in East Africa.

Tarrah Beebe‘s recent blog post about work in Tanzania is well worth a read: https://rafikireturns2026.blogspot.com/2026/02/asante-same-couple-days-in-same-tanzania.html

In this screenshot, Tara describes how she connects her teaching, architectural design, and outreach activities.

In fact, it was Tarrah’s February 3rd blog post that inspired me to share the treasure trove below. Tara is an architect living in Los Angeles.

Tarrah mentioned me at the top of the blog, and it means a lot to me that I helped enable and inspire her to stay involved in Tanzania. She’s been helping build an educational complex for many years.

In this screenshot, Tara provides information on the educational facility.

Japan

Like me, Tarrah also visited Japan. You can read all about her Japanese adventures here: https://tarrahinjapan.blogspot.com/

Which brings me to the other recent post I’d like to share. Shinya Takehara isn’t a Fulbright fellow (yet!), but I feel I wouldn’t have met him without the entry I got into engineering education research as a Fulbright Fellow in Ireland.

Shinya‘s recent LinkedIn post summarizes the visit Sarah Junaid and I made to Japan in January 2026 (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-international-dialogue-engineering-ethics-from-takehara-517vc/?trackingId=Ky2esIgHcl0VweGzp4rMTA%3D%3D). Because I don’t have a link for people outside LinkedIn to access the content, I’ll share screenshots of Shinya’s description below.

I am deeply indebted to each of these wonderful people — Shinya, Tarrah, Mia, and Violet — for making my life brighter and more meaningful, and for always reaching out to help others and spread the ethics of care.

I also thank Shinya, Tarrah, and Mia for giving me permission to share their posts here. Sending that request brought more good news, as Mia has recently secured a new job and will be relocating with her family to Germany soon. She reports good progress with her Architecture Registration Examination — a grueling multi-part test that takes most of us years to complete. I am so excited to learn of her progress!

by shannonchance

Ready for a Fulbright Award?

I highly recommend applying for a Fulbright Award, to Ireland or elsewhere in the world. I had a Fulbright award to Ireland in 2012-13 that was truly life-changing.

Fulbright U.S. Scholar Awards are opportunities available to U.S. professionals, artists & scholars to research/teach, and carry out projects in more than 160 countries worldwide. Those 160+ countries send scholars and students to the USA, as well.

2026-27 U.S. Scholar Program
Deadline: September 15, 2025, 5pm EDT

2026-27 U.S. Student Program Deadline: October 7, 2025, at 5pm Eastern Time

Fulbright U.S. Student Awards are grants for U.S. citizens to complete postgraduate research or study over the course of 1 year in Ireland.

by shannonchance

Fulbright Scholars Program: Calling New Applicants

Are you an aspiring Fulbright scholar?  This year’s call for applicants is open!

The competition for the Core Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program for the academic year 2015-2016 will be opening in a matter of days.  Be sure to consult the IIE/CIES website (www.cies.org) for complete award information.  Please also note that CIES will be opening its webinar series this Thursday (January 30) at 2:00 PM EST with “What’s Fulbright?,” a presentation on the Scholar Program in general [note from Shannon: you should be able to find this in the archives since it already happened]. That will be followed on Wednesday (February 5) at 2:00 PM EST with “What’s New?,” a presentation on 2015-2016 competition highlighting new awards, program innovations and other areas of interest.  As always, be sure to note that the competition deadline will be Friday (1 August 2014). We look forward to seeing you.
Best wishes,

Andy Riess, Ph.D.
Assistant Director, Outreach
Fulbright Scholar Program
Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES)
Institute of International Education (IIE)

by shannonchance

DIT in Top 1% in the World for Engineering Research!

For the first time ever Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) has been listed in Essential Science Indicators. More impressively, the institution achieved a listing in the top 1% in the world in the areas of Engineering and Agricultural Sciences (which includes Environmental Science)!

I’m hoping that my efforts here contributed in some small way to this achievement — I’ll have to see if any of the conference papers I’ve authored with DIT colleagues while I have been a Fulbright Scholar here at DIT  counted in this ranking.

Apparently, DIT now outranks Trinity College Dublin with regard to Engineering research!

DIT research ranking, May 2013

DIT research ranking, May 2013

by shannonchance

My Interview about the Fulbright Inter-Country Lecturing Program

The Fulbright staff in Belgium interviewed me during my visit.  They asked me to describe some of my experiences with the program and explain how I got involved in it.

I hope the interview is helpful to other Fulbright scholars and to academics who would like to invite Fulbright scholars to speak at their institutions.

And, I hope my friends will enjoy hearing about what I was up to during my recent travels in Portugal and Belgium as well.

by shannonchance

The Impressive National Library of Ireland

You’ll recall that the National Library was on the blog post I made for Kitty Lee.  It was among the things I wanted to see but hadn’t yet.

My recent visitor, Pam Eddy, used to enjoy going there when she was a Fulbright scholar to Ireland in the spring of 2009.  She knew the ropes of getting in and around the place, and that made it easier for me to jump in and enjoy being there.  (I’ll admit I’d been a bit intimidated by the place before going there with her.)

We viewed an exhibition of W. E. B Yeats, stowed our bags in the handy (all glass) lockers, and proceeded into the grand reading hall.  I’ve posted a host of images to show you the grandeur or the hall and the entry procession leading to it.

Photos outside the National Library show the exact same scene a century ago.
Pam and I signed in…
…and looked around the formal reading room.
It doesn’t look so different today…
…than in this old photograph.
The ceiling is beautiful and the space filled with natural light.
The furnishing are from days past…
…the clock…
…and word work from a time when craft was highly valued.
Pam and I…
…collected memories…
…enjoyed the space…
…admired the materials…
…and then found our way back to the door. Perhaps next time we’ll bring some work to do in the stillness of this grand place.

by shannonchance

Fulbrights at “Work”

Because I blog about the experiences I’m having much more often than about than the research I’ve been doing, people sometimes ask me if I’ve been getting any work done at all.  The answer is, emphatically, YES!

The Fulbright program IS about doing scholarly work.  But it’s also about learning. It’s about making the space in our lives to get to know other people and how they do things… to remove ourselves from the ordinary humdrum long enough to learn something that’s radically new to us as Americans, but not new at all in other places.

Fulbright scholars DO have lectures to give, papers to write, and projects to conduct.  But in the end, the most valuable part of our experiences overseas rests in the friendships we make and the respect we build for each other’s culture.  That, I see, as my primary mission.

This type of cultural give-and-take is evident in the images I brought back from Tanzania — so I’ve decided to share a few here. Most are from the 2005 Fulbright-Hays program I conducted for college students from the US and Tanzania. You can also read about a lecture I gave on the topic of African architecture.  I’ll be delivering that lecture again in Belgium this spring….

Kelly Thacker (a student who was studying student affairs in Kansas) learned about urban design by working Tanzanian and US architecture students.
Here, Emmanuel James (from Tanzania) and Lauren Doran (a Virginia Tech landscape architecture student at the time) discuss strategies for city design.
We worked inside the architecture building (shown here) at the College of Lands and Architectural Studies.
But we learned a world more about life than just urban design.
We learned how Tanzanians celebrate weddings and funerals.
How they care for their young and old people.
How they have built traditionally…
…used their resources…
…and buried their dead.
We saw Christians and Muslims living side by side in harmony.
And noticed differences and similarities in the way humans live.
As one specific example, we developed new appreciation for the role of water in living, and…
…in design.

by shannonchance

Canadian Christmas

In 2008, Mom was a Fulbright scholar to Canada, hosted by McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.  Heather, Leslie, Dave, and I went there to spend Christmas with her.  Here are a couple of photos Mom took during our holiday outings.

Heather and Shannon in Toronto art museum.
Dave, Shannon, and Heather outside castle in Canada.

by shannonchance

Visitor Map

It’s always fun to see who is tuning in to Ireland by Chance.

Viewing my statistics map in WordPress helps me assess how well I’m doing my duty as a Fulbright scholar, which I view as helping build and share cultural understanding.

WordPress tracks the number of clicks onto the site shannonchance.net. It’s maps don’t include the people who have the blog delivered to their email boxes, however.

The past couple of weeks, I’ve had far more visitors from Ireland than from home.

Thanks TC, Laurie, and Sima for visiting so often from Germany, France, and UK!  I can thank Esther’s family and friends (like Heidi) for putting Switzerland high on the list, too.

To all of you I don’t know yet, I hope you enjoy your visits and that I’ll get to know you somehow, someday!

Visits to this site up until 10 November 2012.