Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs A. Scott Weber, Olivia Barth and President Satish Kumar Tripathi.
BA in Law graduate wins prestigious Fulbright Scholarship
When the email arrived informing Olivia Barth that she had won a Fulbright Scholarship, it came as a surprise.
“I was completely shocked,” says Barth, who graduated this May from UB Law’s BA in Law program and had applied for the Fulbright last October. “I had almost forgotten about it.” It was also unclear whether the program, which is administered by the U.S. Department of State, would be funded this year.
But that email changed everything. Now Barth is trying to learn a little Mandarin in advance of her Sept. 1 assignment teaching English in Kaohsiung, the third most populous city in Taiwan.
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program, established in 1946, is merit-based. It places students all over the world with the intention of fostering mutual understanding between the United States and other countries. This year’s awardees include six University at Buffalo students.
When she came to UB, Barth planned to major in environmental studies, but she soon realized she’d need additional tools to truly make a difference. “We were learning a lot about the environmental challenges our world is facing, but I just felt like the conversation wasn’t as action-oriented as I wanted it to be,” she says. “I saw a path for myself to maybe make a real difference.” That path led her to a double major; she enrolled in the BA in Law program halfway through her undergraduate career. “I ended up falling in love with it,” she says. “The two disciplines really speak to each other.”
She spent her junior year abroad in the Netherlands and took a lot of law courses at VU Amsterdam to fulfill the BA requirements—classes including Migration and Legal Remedies, International Human Rights Law and Climate Change Law. In her senior year, back in Buffalo, she deepened her legal experience through an externship at Neighborhood Legal Services.
“Olivia displayed enthusiasm for learning both in the classroom and in her placement at the Housing Unit of Neighborhood Legal Services,” says Melinda Saran, interim vice dean for undergraduate studies and vice dean for undergraduate student affairs. “She noted in her internship reflections that ‘it is one thing to simply have access and another to effectuate an outcome with that access.’
“Her supervising attorney at NLS shared, ‘I have never before encountered a law student intern, much less an undergraduate intern, so eager to learn and with such a strong drive to help our client population.’”
Barth had been thinking about working at NLS this summer, but knew the Fulbright offer was too good to pass up.
There’s online training for Fulbright recipients, which will earn her a provisional teaching certificate. Barth expects she’ll be assigned to a middle school in Kaohsiung, a port city on Taiwan’s southern coast, working alongside a certified English teacher.
Compared to her academic year in Amsterdam, she says, the experience will come with a lot more responsibility. And a lot fewer people in Taiwan speak English, so she knows there will be challenges in navigating daily life.
Still, she’s eagerly anticipating the adventure of a lifetime. “When people ask me what I’m most looking forward to,” she says, “in addition to the Fulbright experience, it would have to be the food. I’ve heard the night market culture in Kaohsiung is insane.”