2015 Fulbright Grant Announcement

From the HWS website

Colleges Receive Russian Culture Grant

Posted on Friday, November 21, 2014

Hobart and William Smith Colleges have received a $94,176 grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA) Program that will enable a group of HWS students to attend an intensive study program in the Altai region of Russia.

Awarded to the Colleges' Russian Area Studies Program, for "Siberian Culture in the Golden Altai," this is the third time GPA funding is helping students attend. Seventy-seven percent of the total cost of the $122,000 Altai program is funded by GPA, with the remaining 33 percent contributed by HWS and nominal contributions by each participant.

In cooperation with the Altai State Pedagogical Academy, an HWS exchange partner in Russia, the program will send a group of seven HWS students, seven regional K-12 teachers and the program director, Associate Professor of Russian Area Studies David Galloway, to Siberian Russia for five weeks in summer 2015. Participants will study intensive Russian language and the culture of the Altai region.

This is the third Fulbright-Hays GPA grant to Russia secured by the Russian Area Studies program, which successfully sent students to Siberia in 2006 and 2009. The grants are extremely competitive, and fewer than 20 are funded each year. Part of the reason the grants are so sought after is that they fund almost every abroad expense for participants: most of those who travel on the program can expect to spend $600 or less for the entire experience; without the grant, the trip would cost ten times as much, or about $6,200 per person.

The 2015 grant differs from previous programs in that it capitalizes on the Colleges' new exchange agreement with Altai State Pedagogical Academy and that it includes regional K-12 teachers as part of an explicit goal to increase knowledge of Russia in the upstate New York area.

For more information about the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA) Program, visit: http://www2.ed.gov/programs/iegpsgpa/index.html

In the first photo, HWS students play a game with children in a village in Eastern Siberia during a 2009 cultural excursion to Russia that was funded by a grant from the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA). This year, the Colleges were awarded another grant from GPA that will help to support a group of HWS students who will attend an intensive study program in the Altai region of Russia during summer 2015.

The second photo offers a view of the Katun River in Russia's Altai region where HWS students participating in the "Siberian Culture in the Golden Altai" program will visit.