Over 100 people gathered at a luncheon in the First Amendment Forum on Wednesday to watch the Humphrey Fellows graduate from their 10-month stay at the Walter Cronkite School.
Each of the fellows spoke before Cronkite faculty, their host families, students and professional affiliates about their gratefulness for the opportunity to be a part of the fellowship and about the program’s main themes of change and legacy.
Aleksandra Dukovska, a Humphrey Fellow from Macedonia, said she looked forward to taking some of the lessons she learned at the Cronkite School back home.
“You will be on one crossroad, and this knowledge will help you to choose the right way,” she said. “The highlight of this program was change, so I think I will need a couple of changes when I go home.”
The fellows were the first in the Humphrey program to experience American culture and study journalism at the Cronkite School.
“I learned American culture, newscasting and studio production,” said Mukesh Ropeta, from Pakistan. “It’s changed my life.”
According to Ivy Bohnlein, Humphrey program manager for Cronkite Global Initiatives, Ropeta could become the first Hindu television producer in Pakistan, in large part because of his experience in the Humphrey Fellowship Program.
“They had the opportunity to gain professional experiences and to experience the American workplace, but also just to see what a school like this is like with these resources,” Bohnlein said. “To be able to come here and sit down and go through the process of producing a television show — that’s something that one of our fellows, Mukesh, never would have been able to get at home.”
Bill Silcock, director of Cronkite Global Initiatives, said the fellows mingled in classes, hallways and debates, and they were even speakers for Must-See Mondays.
“This is a chance for us to expand globally, which is primarily for our students,” Silcock said. “Walter (Cronkite) was a global journalist and worked overseas reporting around the world, so the Humphrey program allows us to do this in his honor.”
Bohnlein said having the fellows in classes at the Cronkite School gave students a perspective from professionals with experience reporting in other countries, which would have been difficult to get in other circumstances.
“We’re living in a truly international world now, and this gives us the opportunity to bring in a bunch of different international students and embed them in courses,” said Christopher Callahan, dean of the Cronkite School. “From their perspective, it adds incredible richness to the dialogue in those courses. We probably learn more from them than they learn from us.”
Callahan said he hopes the Humphrey Fellowship will extend past the five-year grant from the State Department to become a permanent program for the Cronkite School. He also commended Silcock for his work with the complex program, which ran very smoothly during its first year at the Cronkite School.
“There are only 18 Humphrey programs around the country, and they’re at places like Vanderbilt, MIT and Cornell,” Callahan said. “To have a Humphrey program at a university is very prestigious.”
Contact the reporter at alancial@asu.edu
