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This summer, three Syracuse students crossed the Atlantic for immersive academic three-week programs through the . Only 30 students were selected nationwide for this prestigious program.

Though their subjects couldn’t have been more different, Ellie Ensign, Clara Hasegawa and Anthony Viola engaged in an experience that reshaped how they think about their own field of study.

Ellie Ensign ’29—Queen’s University Belfast: Listening Across a Divide

Ensign, an international relations major in the and and a marketing management major in the , spent three weeks in Queen’s University Belfast’s (QUB) international summer school studying Northern Ireland’s history and the dynamics of divided societies. The program paired classroom lectures on nationalism and populism with field trips to Derry-Londonderry, the North Coast, Crumlin Road Gaol and Stormont.

One conversation stayed with her most: a session with Brian Rowan, a journalist who covered Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Rowan described the burden of relaying information from every side of a conflict to the public, without a rulebook to guide him. For Ensign, it reframed how she thinks about storytelling under pressure. She learned that pursuing unbiased truth doesn’t mean there’s a single clear path to it.

A second formative moment came from Karl Vidamour, a QUB doctoral student who spoke about how environmental issues get filtered through the same “othering” dynamics as political ones. It showed Ensign the patterns she was studying in Belfast appear in places she wouldn’t have expected, including debates back home.

Clara Hasegawa ’29—Lancaster University: Finding a Voice Behind the Sound

For Hasegawa, a film major in the , the defining challenge of her program at Lancaster University was collaborative filmmaking—pitching, critiquing and producing a script as a team that would share a single grade.

Going in, she worried about managing creative differences among a group of equally passionate filmmakers. Instead, she found the experience to be the highlight of her trip. After each student wrote and pitched a short screenplay, the group settled on one story to produce together and divided up production roles.

Hasegawa ended up as sound designer, a role she’d never held before, working alongside a first-time cinematographer and a first-time director.

The group’s film explored the anthropocene, the time we are living in, using Lancaster’s city streets to evoke humanity’s disruption of the natural world. Hasegawa built much of the soundscape from field recordings of traffic and crowds, and in hindsight, wishes she’d gathered even more raw audio to layer into the mix.

Beyond the shoot itself, weekend travel to Liverpool, the Lake District and London gave her a broader sense of British storytelling traditions, from the Beatles Museum to Beatrix Potter’s house to the West End stages.

Anthony Viola ’28—University of St Andrews: History as Information Architecture

Viola, an information management and technology major in the, found that a Scottish history program at the University of St Andrews spoke directly to his discipline. Visits to the university’s special collections archive showed him how carefully organized historical documents and letters preserve context, not just content, and he found himself applying that lens throughout the trip.

This insight structured his experience of Dunnottar Castle, a ruined fortress perched on cliffs above the North Sea, built in part to physically separate classes by keeping servants on the lower levels. Walking through its remains, Viola began seeing the castle itself as a form of information storage, its architecture encoding a history that’s still open to interpretation.

The three students worked with the to apply for the Fulbright UK awards. For more information, contact cfsa@syr.edu