Recent La Salle Graduate Lauren Clay
Receives Fulbright Scholarship

A recent photo of Clay taken with two young girls near the city of Dhaka

Lauren Clay, a 2005 graduate of La Salle University, has received a Fulbright Scholarship to study microfinance in Bangladesh. She is taking a leave of absence from the New School for General Studies in New York City, where she is studying International Affairs.

After graduating from La Salle, Clay spent a year teaching English at Hue University in Vietnam. Before returning to the United States, she went to Bangladesh to visit the Grameen Bank.

At La Salle, Clay majored in History and minored in Leadership and Global Understanding.

“I taught Lauren in four courses,” said Br. Edward Sheehy, an Associate Professor of History at La Salle, “and she struck me both as an outstanding student and an outstanding young adult. She impressed me with her breadth of knowledge and ability to converse and write well on a variety of topics.”

Clay became interested in learning about international topics while a student in the “Semester at Sea” program during her junior year at La Salle, where she visited several countries, including Vietnam. Shortly after graduation, she participated in a La Salle project to build homes in Mexico.

“Semester at Sea sounded like an amazing program. I liked that there was a strong community on the ship while traveling through the world. It was a very supportive environment,” said Clay. “It also seemed amazing to get to go to so many places and have each stop backed by coursework. I thought that was a valuable way to experience new places and peoples.”

Clay’s time in Vietnam made a profound impression on her, so much that she wanted to go back.

“Vietnam is a wonderful country,” said Clay. “The thing that attracted me the most was that is reminded me of my home in Louisiana: the climate, the crops, farmers, rain, heat. Also,the values. Family is your primary social circle in Vietnam, and I feel that is more true in Louisiana than any other place I've lived.”

“Also, families are big and tight knit -- something true for both. While on Semester at Sea, maybe it was because I was homesick by the time we reached Vietnam, or maybe it was that Vietnam and Louisiana actually have a lot in common (I still think it’s the latter), but I wanted to go back.”

Which she did, first with a La Salle travel study-class and then she moved there for a year to teach English through the Volunteer in Asia program.
For her senior thesis, she wrote on the Vietnam War. During her time spent teaching there, she said the topic did not come up much when talking to Vietnamese people.

“Some older Vietnamese expressed to me that it was great that we (younger people) were able to interact without the past influencing us,” she said. “This is just the feeling that I got from the people that I interacted with regarding the war. In day-to-day life, I didn't discuss it with most people. It just wasn't something that came up all the time. I was friends with a man who served as a firefighter with the American Army, and he was proud of that and eventually told me about that. But with college-aged Vietnamese students, we didn't really discuss it that much.”

Clay did not know the Vietnamese language before teaching.

“I had 30 hours in my first two weeks in Vietnam and then continued to study it for the duration in weekly lessons, about 3 hours a week. It is a difficult language to learn, the tones are difficult to learn to say as well as to recognize when listening and trying to understand. Your mouth moves in ways that English doesn't require.”

“I learned enough to be able to get by I'd say. I could order food, have a basic conversation about myself, my family, where I'm from, etc., and ask others about themselves, and I got very good at giving directions.

“The students that I taught were English education majors,” said Clay. “They were in their first year of University and were studying to eventually become English teachers, so they all had a pretty solid base. I actually taught the entire freshman class so I had about 160 students. It was a great time. I started out with the basics and learned that they were bored with that, so I spiced things up. I had my advanced class debating global warming by the second semester. I also had all my classes do presentations on America’s states. In groups they chose a state and had to do a 5-7 minute presentation about that state, and they had to make it exciting. There were costumes, a spaceship -- for Texas and NASA, and I even had one group of boys write a song about the state of Michigan and perform it too. We had a lot of fun.”

Clay and her family moved to Philadelphia when she began at La Salle. She chose
La Salle “because when I looked at schools in Philadelphia, it was important that it have a feeling of community. That is something that I felt from visiting La Salle that I didn't feel when on other campuses.”