(source: Courtesy of Fulbright Slovakia)
Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize laureates, scientists, diplomats, politicians and important personalities are among the graduates of the Fulbright Program, one of the largest international educational exchange programmes in the world.
Operating in partnership with the United States and more than 160 countries around the world, the programme celebrates 75 years since its launch, increasing mutual understanding between citizens of the USA and other countries.
“The Fulbright scholarship is one of the best known and most prestigious awards for scientific and academic work an academic can receive,” said Michal Vašečka, sociologist and programme director of the Bratislava Policy Institute, who chaired the Board of the J.W. Fulbright Commission in Slovakia between 2010-2017.
Vašečka is also one of the 362 Slovaks who were offered a chance to study and do research in the USA in the 27 years since Slovakia joined the club. The list of Slovak Fulbrighters, as the graduates from the programme are called, include personalities in the field of politics, diplomacy, medicine, law, culture and economics, who share the acquired knowledge and experience in their personal and professional lives.
Life-changing experience
Among them is sociologist and former prime minister Iveta Radičová, Slovak Ambassador to the UN in New York Michal Mlynár, Bratislava Regional Governor Juraj Droba, and Bratislava Mayor Matúš Vallo.
Sociologist Vašečka attended the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program in 2008-09, spending his stay at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. In 2019, he took part in the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program, teaching sociology at Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe College in Wisconsin.
