Folashade Olumola, a 2018 graduate of Homewood-Flossmoor High School, has been selected for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Award.
Olumola, a recent graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who majored in political science, will be teaching university students in Turkey beginning in mid-September. The award is for a nine-month period. She is one of 20 U.S. students to receive the English Teaching Assistant Award.
In Turkey the program is administered by the Turkish Fulbright Commission that partners with state universities, according to the Fulbright U.S. Student Program.
As a student at H-F, Olumola was a member of the Mock Trial Team, the Animal Rights Club and Friends of the H-F Library.
During her spring 2022 semester at U of I, Olumola was a Boren Scholar. The program gave her the opportunity to study Arabic in Oman in the Middle East.
At U of I, Olumola was in the James Scholar Program. U of I information describes the program as a means for undergraduates to conduct research and independent study “to view the world from all different perspectives and become change-agents in society.”
Her work in Turkey will be an extension of her work at U of I where she was a teaching assistant intern for an introductory course in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences designed to help familiarize incoming international students with campus culture.
Olumola also was a global leader for the Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations at U of I helping to make connections between domestic and international students.
Olumola’s career goal is to become a foreign service officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development under the Bureau of Development, Democracy and Innovation.