Madison Weisend ’20
Class of 2020, Majors in Environmental Studies and Politics & Human Rights
Madison Weisend, a freshman Environmental Studies major.
Madison Weisend ’20 was awarded a highly prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Program award for an English Teaching Assistantship in South Korea during the 2020-21 academic year. A Boren Scholar who studied Hindi, food security, and women’s rights in India during her sophomore year in 2017-18, Madison completed two majors at MMC: Environmental Studies and Politics & Human Rights.
About
Madison went through a rigorous application process for the Fulbright scholarship and was adjudicated on the basis of her academic and professional achievements, as well as her record of service and leadership potential. She was selected by Fulbright from thousands of applicants in colleges and universities across the country.
In South Korea, Madison will teach middle school English language courses. As she explained in her application essay, “Given my personal interest in the intersection of gender equality and environmental progress, I chose to apply to South Korea because they hold one of the highest gender equality rankings worldwide. It is projected that once gender equality reaches a certain positive threshold, the environmental crisis will follow suit. Achievement of complete gender equality worldwide is projected to prevent 104 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions from now until 2050. Women, most especially in rural areas of developing nations, have been shown to tend natural resources more efficiently than men. This has been shown best in agriculture, where the farm yields of educated women surpass that of men by 26%. This has major implications for food and water scarcity, in addition to land use, deforestation, and climate change mitigation as a whole. I have spent time studying areas of the world with poor gender equality standards, and now want to use South Korea as a case of best practice.”
Description
Madison went through a rigorous application process for the Fulbright scholarship and was adjudicated on the basis of her academic and professional achievements, as well as her record of service and leadership potential. She was selected by Fulbright from thousands of applicants in colleges and universities across the country.
In South Korea, Madison will teach middle school English language courses. As she explained in her application essay, “Given my personal interest in the intersection of gender equality and environmental progress, I chose to apply to South Korea because they hold one of the highest gender equality rankings worldwide. It is projected that once gender equality reaches a certain positive threshold, the environmental crisis will follow suit. Achievement of complete gender equality worldwide is projected to prevent 104 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions from now until 2050. Women, most especially in rural areas of developing nations, have been shown to tend natural resources more efficiently than men. This has been shown best in agriculture, where the farm yields of educated women surpass that of men by 26%. This has major implications for food and water scarcity, in addition to land use, deforestation, and climate change mitigation as a whole. I have spent time studying areas of the world with poor gender equality standards, and now want to use South Korea as a case of best practice.”