Two Brooklyn College Students Win Study-Abroad Scholarship

Junior Christopher Browne and senior Jillian Justh have won scholarships from the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program to study abroad during the fall 2008 semester. Browne will go to Switzerland and Justh is headed to Egypt.

The scholarship program, founded by Congress in 2000, encourages low-income students and others who are underrepresented in study-abroad programs to travel to nontraditional destinations, especially those outside of Western Europe and Australia. Browne and Justh are only the second and third Brooklyn College students to win the scholarship, following Pangeline Edwards, a May 2008 graduate who used the scholarship to help pay for study at China’s Yangtze International University last year.

Christopher Browne

Browne, a business management and finance major, said he wanted to go to Switzerland because “they are the economic envy of the world with their Swiss Bank, and they have been very progressive in the area of social justice.” An American citizen born into a Jamaican family, Browne grew up traveling back and forth between the two countries and said he’s always been interested in learning about different cultures. “Brooklyn is very diverse, but there’s nothing like seeing different people in their own environment,” he said.

Browne, a presidential scholar, received $3,500 from the scholarship competition to study at Schiller International University/The American College of Switzerland in Leysin, which is near Geneva. He said he will be interning in the college’s marketing department, taking 15 credits, and travelling throughout Europe while he is there. “I plan to make the most of it,” he said.

“An entrepreneur at heart,” Browne said he’d like to go on to get both a master’s and a law degree and would like a career that involves both law and marketing and management.

Jillian Justh

Justh received a $4,500 scholarship to study at the American University in Cairo. She said she was interested in the study-abroad program there because she wants to learn Arabic and about Islamic culture in general. She is also hoping to get a Critical Need Language Supplement from the program, which gives extra scholarship dollars to students who intend to study Arabic, Chinese, Turkic, Persian, Indic, Korean, or Russian during their time abroad.

A linguistics major, Justh said she doesn’t like to “learn a language in isolation. I want to know the religion, the culture. This is the best way for me to do that.” She added that she has a personal desire to learn more about Islam and has always had a love for travel, language, and cultures. She has spent time in Poland and went to Ecuador through a College of Staten Island summer program, but “this will be different than anything I’ve experienced,” she said. “I’m a little nervous but looking forward to it.”

Justh is currently participating in a ten-week intensive language program at the CUNY Graduate Center and departs for Cairo less than a week after she finishes her summer program. A Brooklyn College Scholars Program student and Presidential Scholar, Justh said she’d like to study abroad during the spring semester as well.

The Gilman scholarship, a Congressionally funded program, is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State and is administered by the Institute of International Education—Southern Regional Center in Houston. For the fall semester, the program will award more than 1,200 scholarships of up to $5,000 to students in such underrepresented fields as the sciences and engineering, students with diverse ethnic backgrounds, and students with disabilities.