AS they set to jet off to different universities in the United States to pursue higher education, the 2024 Fulbright scholarship recipients said they are looking forward to the opportunity to advance their academic capacity while gaining transformative skills to contribute to Jamaica’s development in the future.

The Fulbright programme, which started in 1946, has provided over 400,000 people across 160 countries the opportunity to gain higher education in high-quality universities across the United States, including over 400 Jamaicans to date.

This year five Jamaicans received the opportunity to gain higher education and all expressed joy and excitement at being able to experience a new culture while studying overseas.

“First and foremost you get to appreciate a culture that is doing it better than you are doing it or a culture that is showing you different best practices that we are not aware of. So the cultural exchange is important, [and] you get to appreciate a bit more of practices that aren’t endemic to our space,” said Andre Cowan, who is currently the acting director of strategic planning and performance management at the Ministry of National Security. Cowan will be pursuing his master’s of public affairs at the University of Texas in Austin and says he is looking forward to gaining more knowledge that he can use to implement new strategies within the ministry.

“I believe that so far we have been doing some good work, especially in my capacity in strategic planning, but I understand that there is need for more, I can do a little bit more, I can help the ministry a little more than I have so far and I think this is a good opportunity to strengthen my position and help my ministry,” he said.

Cowan noted that initially he was intimidated when he was first introduced to the scholarship because of its prestige, but after learning more about its requirements and his academic abilities, he noted that his perspective has changed.

“The Fulbright scholarship programme was very intimidating for me. The name itself, Fulbright, and then you begin to weigh yourself against the name: Am I Fulbright? So I had that battle that I was dealing with, [but] I realise as academic as Fulbright is, the cultural exchange is also critical, and I realise that they are looking for good candidates that can perform academically and be able to able to come back and contribute significantly and also be able to participate in the cultural exchange, and I think that certainly shifted my perspective,” Cowan highlighted.

In the meantime, another recipient of the scholarship, Noel Matherson, explained that receiving this scholarship was special to him because of the fact that it provides him with an opportunity to become the first in his family to graduate from university with a master’s degree.

“It affords me the opportunity to pursue a master’s degree without having to worry about paying for it or accruing debt, whether through student loans, which is a big deal for me. I am a first-generation university graduate; this scholarship programme is going to allow me to become a first-generation graduate student, so I will be the first person in my family doing a master’s degree,” he said.

Matherson currently serves as officer-in-charge of the medical laboratory in the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) and said he is looking forward to the opportunity to study microbiology and immunology at Tulane University in New Orleans. He said he is looking forward to working with new laboratory technologies while developing his scientific knowledge to answer new questions affecting the society.

“There are a lot of lessons coming out of COVID for developing countries like Jamaica, and I believe that pursuing this particular area will enable me to contribute to the JDF, specifically, and to Jamaica, from the standpoint of at least having somebody who is so knowledgeable in this particular area who can then contribute or lend to the existing body of work locally,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

On the other hand, recipients Ashera Barron and O’Dane Mckoy both highlighted that they wanted to change the perspective towards their field of study when they return to Jamaica.

“I will be doing a PhD in communication and information sciences and my interest in that comes from the fact that having been a student of politics as well as an educator in politics, I am aware that there are a lot of youths who have this widespread disillusionment and disenchantment towards politics,” said Barron, who will be studying at the University at Alabama. Mckoy, who will be at the University of North Dakota, is looking to change the perspective towards geology and mining in Jamaica.

“Geology isn’t a wide discipline, if you speak to people its not something that people tend to gravitate towards to right away, but it’s an important industry. The mining industry is viewed in a negative light at times primarily because of the environmental footprint,” he said.

The final recipient, Michael Johnson, explained that attending the Florida Institute of Technology is a perfect opportunity for him to change the pace of his life and step out of his comfort zone.

“My whole life so far, I have been following the script that was given to me. I just started to go down this path of convenience and what’s accessible versus what I really wanted to do. I started to get a little bit disenchanted with where I was at, so I decided that I needed to look for opportunities to just change things up a bit. I didn’t know where I would end up, but I just figured I needed a change. I was doing the same thing year after year after year.”

He said this is a chance to study in a field which he is not familiar with, moving from industrial engineering to studying for a master’s degree in computer engineering.

In the meantime, public affairs officer at the United States Embassy, Michael Lavallee, said the Fulbright scholarship will provide life-changing opportunities for the students, allowing them to engage in cultural exchange, which he said is the key towards building the relationship between the United States and Jamaica.

“The Fulbright is a keystone of our bilateral relationship, because it’s about mutual understanding, it’s about understanding each other’s cultures, and to date we have had over 400 Jamaicans participate in the Fulbright programme, and so this has created people-to-people ties between the United States and Jamaica that we could have never had otherwise. It’s helped us to understand each other, and it’s helped us to work together to solve problems that we mutually face, and so it is a very, very big part of what we do as two nations,” he said.