Dear NAF member,
We may have met in the Plaza Hotel in New York this Friday. I am one of the lucky ones who was invited to go to the Peter Stuyvesant Ball because you have awarded me a NAF-Fulbright scholarship this year. I wish I would have had an opportunity to thank all of you personally for what your generous contributions have enabled me to do. Unfortunately there were far too many of you to shake all your hands individually. Instead I have decided to convey my gratitude to you with this letter.
I am Dorien Venhoeven, born and bred in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. I did my undergrad at University College Utrecht and took courses in development studies, international relations, anthropology and religious studies. When I graduated I knew I wanted to pursue a Master’s degree in something related to the former. However, I wanted to get some work experience first and figure out which aspect of international development intrigued me most. I moved to Ghana to be with my fiancé Gaspar and worked for Trax, a small Ghanaian NGO, for a year and a half. While I was there Gaspar and I made up our minds that we both wanted to go back to school and that we did not want to study in Ghana. It felt like the world was at our feet.
I love the excitement of discovering new places, trying to understand new people and using that to reflect on my own ‘normal’. I felt like going to do my Master’s would teach me a lot but doing it in a new place was going tot teach me at least twice as much. It would be a missed opportunity not to do it in unknown territory. Holidays to foreign places are amazing but what I like even better is to stay somewhere for a (few) year(s) so that I spend enough time to find out what really goes on in people’s lives: what they like to talk about with friends, what concerns them and what doesn’t, what they believe in and which historical, cultural and economic factors influenced that. I equally love to be able to share what I learnt in one place (Ghana for example) with others elsewhere (in the US in this case).
When looking for different kinds of Master’s programs in the field of food security there was one university I had a particular interest in. While researching food and agriculture related issues for my work in Ghana I often came across the name of Tufts University in publications. I googled them and found one program that seemed to offer exactly the program I was looking for, but as soon as I got to the page with the tuition costs I quickly closed the website. There was no way I would be able to pay such kinds of fees!
Weeks went by and I could not forget about the Food Policy and Applied Nutrition program at Tufts. I searched for scholarships and when I read about Fulbright I started to get some hope that maybe there was a possibility it would all work. I went through the process and now I’m here, just back in Boston from the weekend in New York, ready to go to class at Tufts again tomorrow.
Maybe Fulbright alumni are in a better position to testify to the value that the experience had for them later in life but I can already say that so far it has been priceless! Tufts is one of the top institutions in my field and I feel honored to be able to study here. In accordance with all the advice we got from alumni and other Fulbrighters, though, I do my best to also spend plenty of time outside of the classroom, getting to know Boston and its inhabitants and that has been equally fascinating.
Dear NAF member, without the foundation I would not have been here and so I would like to thank all of you, whether you were present at the ball or not, for your support. Please accept my virtual handshake of gratitude.