2008 Woodie Awards
Future Fulbright teaching assistant Brandon Winter
Issue date: 4/29/05 Section: Features
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"For my birthday one year (Sept. 15) my brother gave me a Jesus action figure to add to the worthless junk," said Brandon. "I also have a soap microphone for the shower, an inflatable hat from Japan that says 'you're number one' in Japanese and a plaid suit. There's also Dave and Sandy's hot sauce; you can't eat it. It's the extract from pepper spray, but it's sauce. It's pure crap."
A Greensboro native, Brandon attended Guilford Day - a school with 160 students. His graduating class had 16 seniors.
"(Guilford Day) is a tiny school for kids with learning disabilities," he said. "It was great; we called our teachers by their first names."
When Brandon was a high school senior, he became a community DJ for WQFS.
"I once played a song I wasn't supposed to play during my training," Brandon said. "It was kind of humiliating because the guy training me had just finished telling me about a huge fine for playing profanity - that was great. Good times."
One year later, Brandon decided to come to Guilford for college after seeing several of his friends come enjoy it here. He will graduate as an English major with a German concentration. Although sad to be leaving, he admits that "I don't want to do work anymore, but I am going to miss hanging out with my friends and seeing my teachers every morning."
Brandon enjoys the laid-back atmosphere of Guilford as well as the close interactions with teachers. He credits his interest in the Fulbright program to Associate Professor of Foreign Languages & Humanities Division Director Dave Limburg.
"I was leaving class one day and Dave said to me, 'You should apply for the Fulbright Scholarship program.' I didn't know what it was. So I asked him about it and he told me it was a year in Germany. It sounded pretty cool," said Brandon. "I don't think I would have gotten to do the scholarship if I went to a bigger school because they wouldn't know me, and my teacher wouldn't say 'Try this - it's fun.'"
According to the Fulbright website, "The program helps to improve the teaching of the American language and American studies at German secondary schools."
"The teaching assistant is responsible for 12 hours of some kind of teaching," said Limburg. "The rest is deliberately a lot of free time for you to explore."
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