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Maureen Taylor is no stranger to Bosnia; she traveled there twice in the late 1990s to conduct research. However, she says, going there as a Fulbright Scholar was the most rewarding professional experience of her life. “Every day that I was there, I would wake up and think to myself, ‘Wow, I’m a Fulbright Scholar,’” she says. “I had this great opportunity to be a teacher, researcher and an ambassador. It was wonderful.”
An associate professor of journalism at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Taylor previously researched postwar nation-building and civil society in Bosnia. Although she knows the region well, she says it took her a long time to understand how Bosnia was transitioning out of the war. She witnessed some of the pitfalls and successes of a country that is only a few years old. “This trip, I saw a stronger, independent media with a more balanced tone and fairer content, a much stronger and more vocal political system, and an increase in the number of human rights groups. As a Fulbrighter, I could take that insight into the classroom and incorporate it into my lectures,” she reports.
During her five-month stint at the University of Sarajevo, she lectured in ethics, public relations, media technology and political communications and helped with curriculum development. “There is a great interest in public relations but not a lot of class offerings,” she says. To help remedy that, Taylor worked with graduate students who may teach public relations courses in the future. She also was a guest lecturer at Brcko University and Tuzla University and wrote two papers on media development that appeared in Bosnian academic journals. A third paper on that same topic is currently being reviewed for publication in Gazette, an international mass communications journal.
A high point for Taylor was spending time with students during her office hours. She explains that in Bosnia professors earn so little that they all need second jobs. This leaves no time for working with students outside of class. In addition to discussing class work, Taylor helped the students find scholarships on the Internet and investigated educational opportunities in America for them. “They were all so eager to study in the United States and so grateful, even amazed, that someone had taken time to help them. It was very rewarding.”
Taylor also treasured conversations she had with her colleagues at special events or ceremonies. “Those events were so important to me because that was the only time I saw most of the other professors,” she explains. “They were always very warm and kind and made me feel very welcome.” Because the city is small, Bosnians have access to officials and dignitaries Americans would never get to meet. Taylor met and spoke with a number of “stars” during her stay, including a former president of Bosnia, a general who defended Sarajevo in the war, and a number of others who, she says, are now political leaders or will be in the future.
As a Fulbrighter, Taylor built on her previous investigations of the media needs of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Bosnia. She surveyed 45 NGOs with the help of a graduate student assigned by the dean of faculty to serve as her facilitator, translator and research collaborator. “I always had someone who could share ideas and answer basic questions about the students and the city,” she says. “It was a great help to me and made my time as a researcher and a teacher that much more rewarding.”
Although the days were jammed with academic endeavors, Taylor did find time to visit with the four other Fulbrighters who were in Bosnia at the time, and she often attended local soccer matches.
It was the back-breaking work that she did, however, that she cherishes most. Each month Tom Miller, the U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia, would set up a trip for volunteers to go to a different area that had been “ethnically cleansed.” There, the group would clean debris from houses that had been abandoned during the war. “We used picks and shovels to remove dirt— sometimes as much as five feet deep— in the homes,” she says. “Often, we’d come across items that belonged to the family who fled, like a cup or a plate. It was sad in some respects, but we wanted to show the Bosnian refugees that the international community wants them to return, so we kept working.”
After returning to the United States, Taylor arranged for a small group of educators from the University of Sarajevo to come to Rutgers, where they studied how communications is taught. She has also shared her experience with her students and incorporated some of what she learned into her teaching. “All of the activities I participated in at Sarajevo helped strengthen my understanding of international media and public relations,” she says. “I am passing on to my students as much of that as I can.”
Taylor says she is extremely proud to have been a Fulbrighter. “My contributions were not as great in quantity as I would have liked; nevertheless, I feel I did help the faculty in many ways,” she says. “I can’t say enough about the Fulbright Program. I got so much more out of it than I contributed. I felt I was a part of something larger and that in a small way I was helping.”
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