As professor Micheal Resler explained it, 2007 was a "tsunami" year for the German department at Boston College. The tsunami that Resler was referring to was the record-setting number of Fulbright scholarships awarded from his department to study in Germany this year - 13 in all. The number of Fulbright winners eclipses the then-record-setting amount of eight winners two years ago, and highlights the department's success over the past decade in receiving Fulbright scholarships.
One of the smallest departments at BC, the German department has consistently ranked among the top departments in the country in the number of Fulbrights, with approximately 68 winners over the past decade. The 13 Fulbright recipients were: Atlas Anagnos, A&S '07; Nathaniel Campbell, A&S '07; Stefanie Casillas, A&S '07; Keith Fleischer, A&S '07; Lauren Kestel, A&S '07; Christine Kochefko, A&S '07; Patrick McGroarty, A&S '07; Sascha Rubin, A&S '07; Melissa Ruhry, A&S '07; Jennifer Thibault, A&S '07; Lauren Tran, A&S '07; Amanda Watral, A&S '07; and Paul White, A&S '07.
Although the Fulbright Committee, which awards the scholarships, does not keep track of the statistics such as these, many academic scholars believe that this year represents the largest amount of Fulbrights awarded to one department to study in a specific country in the 60-year history program.
"It's off the charts. We were trying to make up a word for in German to describe this, but no phrase is as good - they were simply off the charts. Nobody has sent this many students to one single country in a year," said Resler, the director of the German department and mentor to many of the Fulbright awardees.
Perhaps most telling about the department's feat is the department's relatively small size and its lack of a graduate program. According to Resler, many other universities have a graduate and doctoral programs in German, which lends to a high rate of Fulbrights - something that BC lacks.
"BC has three different size departments, large departments, medium, and small. We are the tiny one. But that's probably an ingredient to our success. Because we are small, we able to build a lot of tender loving care for our students," said Resler.
