The End of my Fulbright

Today was the final day of my Fulbright Fellowship. During my Fulbright I have collected data for five studies examining:

1. Semantic fluency skills of students who were Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH), hearing, and users of English and/or American Sign Language.
2. Students’ perceptions of word typicality related to category membership.
3. Students’ categorization skills and their cognitive flexibility in re-categorizing words.
4. The speech intelligibility of DHH college students.
5. The sign intelligibility of American Sign Language users.

I wasn’t sure where my Fulbright journey would take me, but at the outset I imagined that it would end at a tangible destination. A list of submitted journal papers. Conference papers to present. Future research projects in preparation. A check list of tasks to indicate a successful scholarship. However, as I check the final items off the list, I am overwhelmed by a feeling that these tangible outcomes are not the destination that I thought they were. As Henry Miller said, “one’s destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things”. That is where my Fulbright journey has taken me. To a world that is bigger and brighter, more challenging and more rewarding than I knew. A world full of new friends, new ideas, and of exciting possibilities that I will be exploring for the rest of my life.