January 2024: Three BSU undergraduates—McKailyn Lort, Ella Schollenbruch, and Abigail Yake—have been awarded Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships for study abroad in the coming months!
The Gilman Scholarship supports undergraduates who are studying abroad. Upon their return to the U.S., recipients are required to carry out a follow-on service project that helps promote international education and understanding.
McKailyn Lort, a sophomore Honors College student, will travel with KIIS to Spain from June to July 2025. McKailyn has a major in mathematics education. After graduation, she intends to teach mathematics abroad, likely in a Spanish-speaking country. Finishing her Spanish minor during this study abroad in Spain will help her move toward her career goal. “I will learn the language better by being immersed in the language and culture,” McKailyn says.
For her follow-on service project, she intends to give presentations about her study abroad experiences to students at the high school she attended. She hopes to inspire high school students as she was inspired in high school to start planning for study abroad in college.
Ella Schollenbruch, is spending the Spring 2025 semester in an internship in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Ella has a major in architecture and intends to teach at the university level. She believes her understanding of design and future teaching in architecture will benefit from “experiencing architecture from around the world and working with designers from different cultures.”
For her service project, Ella will create an immersive experience for first- and second-year architecture students, with the goal of encouraging them to also intern abroad. She will design an UAE-themed space and invite lower-level architecture students to join an interactive simulation of the design process, incorporating elements of the process she will experience during her internship in the UAE.
Abigail Yake will travel to Ecuador and the Galapagos in May of 2025 with a Ball State University faculty-led study abroad program focused on ecology and conservation. A biology major with a concentration in zoology, Abigal looks forward to experiencing “a vast array of flora and fauna” in the Galapagos, a location that she says “any biologist would be honored to visit.” She believes in taking advantage of opportunities, like this trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos, and seeing where they lead.
Abigail has joined three biology research labs and is the secretary of The Wildlife Society at Ball State. She plans to build a website detailing her trip and sharing it with peers who are also involved in these campus activities.
The federally-funded Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program provides up to $5,000* to U.S. undergraduate students pursuing academic studies abroad, in order to better prepare them to assume significant roles in an increasingly global economy and interdependent world. (*Additional support is available to selected students who will study Critical Need Languages or conduct STEM research while abroad.)