Opening Doors: The Flinn Foundation Scholarship Program
Opening Doors: The Flinn Foundation Scholarship Program
From the opening of the Austro-Hungarian borders; to the revolving door of Hungary's cyclic government changes; to the opening of the European Union to Hungary in 2004 and to Romania in 2007, "opening doors" have characterized the past 17 years of Hungarian and Romanian history. Seven years ago, the Flinn Foundation threw open one set of those doors to students in its Scholars Programstudy us.
To prepare these Scholars for independent "purposeful travel," part of the students' $50,000 award, the Foundation instituted a three-week study-travel seminar to engage students with countries whose development would impact their future as professionals and world citizens in the coming decades. In partnership with IIE's European office, the Foundation sought to bond its participants, twenty sophomores from three different public Arizona universities, into a tight cohort; introduce them to persons who could offer disparate perspectives on the target region's most pressing issues; provide them with opportunities for experiential learning; and challenge them to function outside of their linguistic and cultural comfort zones. In Hungary and Transylvanian Romania, the Flinn Scholars Program found complex and productive destinations.
In the northern Hungarian city of Ozd, an economic development program initiated by General Electric (itself an IIE partner) to train students in international (English-language) business skills bears the title "Opening Doors". One Ozd participant, now a second-year high school student, welcomed this year's Scholars with an explosive "I have awaited you like Christmas!" His exuberant greeting proved that "language may be important for details like [how to request] cream in coffee, but for life, emotion and sincerity are more important."
The metallic screech of an iron door announced the Scholars' entrance into the millennium-old mining gallery, unintended homage to the Romans who had painstakingly chiseled a long, low labyrinth through the mountain's gold ore.study us A similarly abrasive clamor emerged from the town's residents and environmental allies who now contest the activities of a multinational mining enterprise converting their community into open pits and taling ponds.
The wooden groan of a sluice gate rising, freeing a stream to course over the old mill water wheels, spoke of other eras of productivity. In the same small town, the scrape of a wooden cattle stall door through wet straw opened a new perspective to lifelong urban-dwelling Scholars who had never kneaded a doe's teat, heard the splash of a milky stream into a tin bucket, or drunk the warm, fresh product, tasting of hay and barn and goat. The local hosts earned the students' gratitude by opening their homes (and barns) and "for [the] warmth and kindness that nourished us both physically and spiritually."
Another experience in Romania put the Scholar's role as visitors into perspective. After leading a morning's discussion of the value globalization "[The village's minister] shared a story [that] depicted the relationship between her village and our group. Her story described the difference between the bear and the eagle. The bear had to climb to reach the peak of a very tall mountain, while the eagle had to descend to reach that same point. In her eyes, her village was much like the bear, while we corresponded to the eagle in the story. The moral was that each group had a very different perspective on the same issues. as outsiders, our group of college students did not have the right perspective to provide a solution to [her community's] diminishing economy." Being grounded in the experience of persons with whom we shared only two days helped students recognize that their theories of political, economic and social development carry real consequences for specific individuals.
One door closed firmly, but unexpectedly, in the face of one Scholar who had been issued a US passport with missing pages. Denied egress from Hungary or entry to Romania, the young woman returned hastily to Budapest, where the US Consul for Citizen Services wedged himself in the US Embassy door, holding it open two hours beyond its scheduled holiday weekend closing to issue her a temporary emergency passport. Her awakening to the unyielding reality of borders and her status as an "illegal alien" sobered the entire Scholar cohort and prompted thoughtful discussions of immigration across multiple boundaries.
In a different era, the doors of Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Piliscsaba, Hungary, would have opened only to army officers, the campus having been repurposed from a closed military facility. Now masked by pastoral arcades and faux-gothic facades, the utilitarian doors of the army camp's prison now open into the dean's office, and classified activities now yield to open academic inquirystudy us
For most of our Scholars, this trip provided (in the words of one student) "my introduction to a continent that had until a month ago been known to me only through history books and the exceptional movie that made it across the Atlantic. I have found so many answers here, but I think the questions I have found are of greater value.
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