Riskind ’11 Awarded Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Taiwan

Abigail Chorlton Riskind ’11, of Wellesley, Mass., has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Taiwan. A self-designed Chinese language and civilization major, she will teach English to elementary or junior high school students in Yilan County in northeastern Taiwan. She leaves for her 11-month stay in late July.

Riskind, who is a member of the College Honors Program, spent her spring semester of junior year studying in Beijing. For her independent cultural immersion project in Beijing, she began researching a challenging social and economic issue, the effects of the one-child policy on China’s elderly. She developed this topic into a senior honors thesis that examined how a series of Communist policies that overturned Confucian structure have impacted the quality and availability of modern day senior care in China.

Following her Fulbright experience, she plans to focus further education and her career around China. She hopes to attend business school, and join an international or governmental organization that has operations in both the United States and China.

At Holy Cross, Riskind was co-chair of the Modern Languages and Literatures Student Advisory Committee, a senior interviewer in Admissions, and Student Programs for Urban Development (SPUD) program director for Kid’s Café at the Boys and Girls Club of Worcester and Plumley Village Teen Mentoring. She also participated in club field hockey and the Purple Key Society, and completed two internships through Holy Cross’ Summer Internship Program at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Mass/Metrowest. Additionally, she created an internship the summer after her sophomore year, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she worked closely with the assistant curator of Chinese art on cataloging ancient artifacts.

Each year approximately 1,000 college students are awarded grants through the Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship program in international educational exchange. Fulbright grants are made to U.S. citizens and nationals of other countries for a variety of educational activities, primarily university lecturing, advanced research, graduate study and teaching in elementary and secondary schools. Since the program’s inception in 1946, more than 250,000 participants — chosen for their leadership potential — have had the opportunity to observe each other’s political, economic and cultural institutions.

Read about this year’s other Holy Cross Fulbright Grant recipients: Francesca Bruzzese ’11, Jennifer Caffrey ’11, Kerry Drury '11, Kristen Dunlap ’08, Herma Gjinko ’11, Jamie McCarthy ’11, Thomas McGlynn ’11 and Kathryn Simison ’11.