Monday, May 21, 2018 4:00 AM
Four Wabash College students have accepted postgraduate fellowships to serve as English Teaching Assistants (ETA) in Austria, Germany and Spain. In all, 30 Wabash men have earned international fellowships in the last five years.
Joey Dierdorf ’18 and Taylor King ’18 each received a Fulbright ETA award to Germany as well as a United States Teaching Assistantship (USTA) award to Austria. Dierdorf elected to accept the Fulbright, while King selected the USTA award. Marcus Hoekstra ’18 won a Fulbright ETA award to Spain, and Aren Peterson ’16 earned a year in Austria as a USTA recipient.
The Fulbright and USTA programs are similar in their goals to place recipients in a classroom abroad to provide assistance to teachers of English to non-native English speakers, while serving as a U.S. cultural ambassador. It is the job of these native English speakers as teaching assistants to make learning a foreign language a lively cross-cultural encounter for their students. The age and academic level of classroom students varies by country, ranging from kindergarten to university.
A double major in studio art and political science with a minor in German, Dierdorf was a member of the Glee Club for four years, an award-winning editorial cartoonist for The Bachelor, and active with the German Club, Sons of Wabash, Alpha Phi Omega, and Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. He took immersion trips to Tübingen, Germany, and London, England, and studied abroad in Vienna, Austria.