Study in US: Two ASU alums selected for U.S. Department of State fellowship

The U.S. Department of State fellowship is open to all candidates in the age group of 18 ½ and 24. They can be from any field and should be interested in professional, academic, and cultural exchange.

Study Abroad: Two of the graduates of Arizona State University have been selected for the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX) for the Young Professionals program. Huong Emma Dang and Pacey Smith-Garcia started an 11-month stint as program fellows in Germany.

The fellowship is a joint program of the U.S. Congress and the German Bundestag. It is in its 41st year and provides 75 German and 75 American young leaders a chance to spend a year in other's country interning, living and studying. German candidates get to visit the US, and vice versa.

Kyle Mox, associate dean for national scholarships said, “The CBYX program is a remarkable opportunity to gain both professional experience and benefit from deep engagement with a foreign culture. Our students who have previously received this award have raved about their experiences.”

Many students have received this award in recent times including Katherine Ciaramello and Michelle Ailport in 2022-2023 and Jordan Harb in 2023-2024.

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Smith-Garcia completed his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He worked with ICT News and helped to create a new segment for teaching the Ute Mountain language and other Native American languages. He produced two award-winning documentaries and hopes to create more in the future. During his CBYX fellowship, for the first two months, he was at the language school in Saarbruken, near the French border. For the remaining part, he will be at the University of Cologne to focus on journalism coursework.

Smith-Garcia will also complete an internship in public media with focus on television or long-form storytelling.

“I am incredibly grateful to have been selected for the CBYX program. I have been in Germany for about a month now and I am still as excited as I was on the first day to experience living in a new country,” said Smith-Garcia.

On the other hand, Huong Emma Dang graduated in informatics. She aims to combine her passion for software engineering and user experience design. She graduated from Barrett with honours and focused on projects with enterprise resource planning systems while working in information technology.

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