Emily Wilkerson '15 Receives Fulbright Grant

Emily Wilkerson ’15, a comparative literature and German double-major, has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Germany.

From Niskayuna, New York, Wilkerson says she came to Oberlin with the intention of studying music but “ended up finding [her] academic home in comparative literature.” She added her German major after spending her junior year studying at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

Wilkerson says her primary reason for applying for the fellowship was to return to Germany. “My year abroad in Munich was the single best and most transformative year of my life thus far, so I knew I had to pursue any opportunity to go back.” Additionally, Wilkerson says she hopes to gain experience in teaching. “One of the many things I can picture myself doing is teaching, either at the university or high school level,” she says. “My hope is that a year of working as a teaching assistant will help me decide if teaching is something I'd really like to do.”

Though she doesn’t yet know the age of the students she’ll be teaching, Wilkerson says her teaching assistantship will be at a school in Lower Saxony. The assistantship will begin in August with an orientation in Wermelskirchen, Germany.

In her time at Oberlin, Wilkerson was a member of Nothing But Treble, Oberlin’s first all-female a cappella group, and Collegium Musicum, a group that specializes in the performance of medieval, renaissance, and early baroque music. She also worked as a lifeguard, a campus tour guide, a German tutor, and a student blogger for the Office of Communications.