Another IE3 Fulbright recipient! Congratulations Austin Charron!

I am constantly impressed by what IE3 alumni go on to accomplish. An internship in and of itself is a challenge, but for many of our students it is one stepping stone in a long list of challenges and accomplishments.  Read the article below to find out more about Austin Charron. He’ll be spending the coming year in the Ukraine on a Fulbright Scholarship: 

http://pmr.uoregon.edu/current-uo-news/multimedia/multimedia-archive/a-world-of-understanding

Austin Charron came to the University of Oregon to study history. It wasn’t long, however, before he found himself immersed in the cultures, languages, politics, and geography of present-day Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

In fact, Charron, a 2008 graduate of the UO and the Robert Donald Clark Honors College, will spend next year on a Fulbright Scholarship in Simferopol — the capital of the Crimea — in Ukraine.

Throughout his time at the UO, the geography and Russian major blended academic disciplines with real world experience. He studied for five months in St. Pertersburg, Russia, where he polished his Russian-language skills.

“If you really want to get to know a people and a place, knowing the language is vital,” says Charron, from Corvallis. “I had the chance to get out of the city and see some places tourists don’t often go.”

But seeing the northwest corner of Russia wasn’t enough for Charron. Before graduating, he completed an IE3 Global Internship in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic in Central Asia, where he taught English to grade schoolers before trekking around Central Asia.

“Getting to see a place like that was amazing,” Charron says. “Some people might have a hard time pointing out Kyrgyzstan on a map. But it’s really important for me to go to these places, get to know people and see them first hand.”

Charron’s experiences on campus in Eugene and abroad played off each other, lending insights, understanding and context to his travels and his academic work. For his honors thesis he analyzed how the world’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence might affect similar de facto independent regions in the former Soviet Union. His undergraduate research closely relates to what he wants to study in Ukraine as part of the Fulbright program.

In Ukraine, Charron plans to study the Crimean separatist movement. In 1954 — just nine years after the Crimean peninsula hosted Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference — the Soviet Union shifted control of the Crimean territory from Russia to Ukraine. When Ukraine gained independence, it retained control of Crimea, much to the consternation of many in the heavily Russian region who would prefer to be aligned with Moscow.

“The university broadened my horizons and exposed me to things I never would have known about otherwise,” Charron says. “I’ll always be hungry for experience.”

Congratulations, Robbie Lamb! Former IE3 Intern, Future Fulbrighter

Robbie Lamb, a former IE3 intern at Equilibrio Azul in Ecuador, is on his way back to Ecuador this fall with a Fulbright Scholarship to help build a marine reserve in the country’s Esmeraldas region.  The following is taken from the OSU Headline News page. See the original article at:http://oregonstate.edu/home/stories/index.php?story=RobbieDives

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Robbie Lamb’s love of marine biology started with his mother’s pre-dawn knocks on his door when he was a child. She woke him so the two could drive from their Portland home to see the Oregon coast’s well-known tide pools. He hated getting up early, but once there, Robbie managed to shake off his drowsiness. The pools inspired him. “I think that’s what really planted the seed for marine biology,” says the senior in the OSU Honors College.

Robbie’s mom didn’t stop there. She urged her reluctant son to spend his junior year of high school as an exchange student in Ecuador. He loved it. Ecuador had so much a teenager like him wanted — diverse ecosystems, more endemic species than almost any country in the world and a rich, varied culture. “It was one of the most formative experiences I had,” he says.

At OSU, Lamb has strengthened the marriage of those two passions – science and culture. He’s a http://biology.science.oregonstate.edu/biology major pursuing an International Degree and marine biology option. He’s spent countless hours in the lab and the field, and he’s written his own grant proposals to get funding for research in the United States, Ecuador and the Bahamas.

But perhaps Lamb’s crowning achievement came in the mail on April 2 — a letter approving a Fulbright grant to continue his studies in Ecuador. In September, Lamb will use the grant to help build a marine reserve in the country’s Esmeraldas region mdash; with fishermen’s input. “I’m very ready to go work with them,” Lamb says. “A big part of developing sustainable fisheries there will be establishing my own relationships with fishermen.”

It won’t be the first time Lamb has melded scientific and cultural work. As a congressional Gilman Scholar, he studied in Ecuador his sophomore year and interned with the Ecuadorian marine conservation group Equilibrio Azul, surveying sea turtle nesting sites and the shark catches fishermen hauled in daily. Counting sharks was a particularly sensitive job in Ecuador at the time. Shark fishing was illegal, and the fishermen were initially suspicious of him.

Gaining their trust was difficult, and where Lamb used to see only a conservationist’s argument, he began to understand the fishermen’s side of the story. “I saw them for the people that they really are. They’re just trying to feed their families,” Lamb says. The experience crystallized his career path. “That experience was very pivotal in directing my interest toward sustainable fisheries,” he says.

Lamb’s travels didn’t end in Ecuador. During his junior year, he took advantage of two of OSU’s undergraduate funding opportunities: the Undergraduate Research, Innovation, Scholarship & Creativity grant and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute program.

The grants took him to the Bahamas, where he worked as a research assistant for zoology professor Mark Hixon and even performed his own study on the effects of Bahamian marine reserves on fish communities. “What’s great about Robbie is that he is so enthusiastic, so willing to work and so dedicated to learning about ocean conservation and management,” says Hixon.

Now, with funding from Oregon Sea Grant, Lamb is working with zoology professor Bruce Menge, studying the same tide pools he visited as a child. He’s looking forward to returning to Ecuador and eventually wants to earn a Ph.D. “I’m definitely interested in teaching. It’s probably the best way to give back to the next generation,” Lamb says.