Getting Ready for Brazil
In between hostess shifts at Cittanuova, hanging out with friends, and catching up on her reading list this summer, Christin Aucapina has challenged herself to improve her knowledge of Portuguese.
Come February, the 22-year-old from East Hampton, who graduated from Brown University in May, is going to speak the language every day when she heads to Brazil as a recipient of a prestigious Fulbright fellowship.
Ms. Aucapina, a 2012 graduate of the Ross School, learned this spring that she had been chosen for the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Program, which places American students in classrooms overseas to teach students ranging from kindergarten to college.
She has already spent time abroad, including courses taken in India and Cuba. In the summer of 2014, she spent a month in the Brazilian state of Sao Paolo.
“I really love Brazil,” she said. “I love how diverse it is. Their culture is really lively, and the people are extremely friendly. . . . It’s a really open community.”
Winning a Fulbright placement is a strenuous process; she spent months fine-tuning her application, Ms. Aucapina said. Because most applicants are linguistics or language majors, and her Brown degree is in public health studies, she had to find other ways to prove herself.
According to the program’s website, in the 2015-16 school year, more than 4,400 people across the U.S. applied for the English teaching program, and about 1,000 were chosen. The Fulbright program, which is government-sponsored, awards separate fellowships for research and other special projects.
For her application, Ms. Aucapina needed recommendations from professors or work supervisors. One came from Yolanda Rome, assistant dean for first-year and sophomore studies at Brown. Ms. Aucapina spent several semesters working in Ms. Rome’s office, where she assisted other students, some of whom were in crisis.
Ms. Rome said by phone this week that Ms. Aucapina was one of her “top recommendations” for the Fulbright program. “She’s great,” Ms. Rome said. “She’s always so excited and interested in helping other people, and has this global perspective that will make her a great Fulbright scholar, so I was so happy when she got accepted.”
Ms. Aucapina will learn her specific teaching assignment in October and will begin in March, when Brazilian schools begin their academic terms.
She plans to take full advantage of her Fulbright fellowship. “I want to make the most of my time there, so I definitely will want to fit in with the campus life there and the city,” she said. “I want to get involved somehow, hopefully through a public health route. I don’t just want to go to work and come home.”
The Portuguese word that best describes her feelings right now, she said, is animada — excited. “This was my goal. I have a plan. It feels good to know what I’m doing after graduation.”