Senior engineering student Pauline Roteta has been selected for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Brazil.
Roteta will graduate in May with a major in civil engineering and a minor in Chinese. In August she will begin work at an asset management firm in New York.
If she accepts the Fulbright assistantship, Roteta will teach English in Brazil. She also will spend time studying the correlation between national English education programs and the effectiveness of microfinance programs.
An impressive record of community leadership and academics led to her selection in 2008 as a Chancellor’s Scholar at Vanderbilt. Roteta left her home in Monte Caseros, Corrientes, Argentina, to move into the Vanderbilt Commons.
As co-president of Manna International, she led Alternative Spring Break projects in Ecuador and Argentina and took the lead in helping raise more than $40,000 in funding to support scholarships and service projects at Manna sites in Latin America. She also helped develop and manage seven service sites in Nashville, working with over 370 student volunteers between the projects.
As president of the Engineering Council, a student organization, she was instrumental in bringing together 18 professional engineering organizations, students, faculty, the Career Center and prospective employers to create a professional community for undergraduates in the School of Engineering.
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program – named for Senator J. William Fulbright and created in 1946 – is now the largest American exchange program offering opportunities for students and young professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and teaching in elementary and secondary schools worldwide. The U.S. Student Program currently awards approximately 1,700 grants annually in all fields of study, and operates in more than 155 countries worldwide.