Tanner graduate and soon-to-be Duke University grad Joshua Lovett has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Program award to South Korea from the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Through the program, Lovett will teach English in South Korea as a way of directly addressing educational inequality and helping students in under-resourced areas. This will be Lovett’s third trip to the country to teach, having first visited Seoul in 2015 as part of the DukeEngage program.

“After that experience, I really fell in love with the culture and language,” Lovett said, adding that he has taken six classes on Korean in his time pursuing a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Duke.

“I was accepted to Harvard for graduate school, but I decided to take a few years and go to Fulbright,” he said.

The Fulbright program is a one-year commitment that can be renewed twice for a total of three years abroad. Lovett said he will probably want to stay the full three years.

When he does return, he plans to pursue a doctorate, but he isn’t sure what he’ll do after that.

“A lot of doors open after that,” he said. “I do want to be a professor eventually. I don’t know where that will be quite yet, but I do plan to come back here for graduate school.”

The Road to Duke

Lovett graduated from Tanner High School in 2014 with an already impressive list of achievements. He founded Tanner’s Junior Red Cross Club, spent six years on the Limestone County Honor Band, served as drum major of the Tanner band his senior year and graduated class president and valedictorian with a 4.4 GPA.

He also volunteered with tornado relief efforts, was named to the Red Cross National Youth Council, won the national John Philip Sousa leadership award and job-shadowed emergency room doctors at Madison Hospital to prepare for his then-dream of becoming a physician.

So it may not have been much of a surprise when Lovett, the first in his immediate family to attend college, not only beat some 30,000 other applicants for a place in Duke University’s 2014-2015 freshman class but also earned a $40,000 scholarship from the university and Tanner’s Lance Looney Memorial Scholarship.

For Lovett, however, it was a bit of a surprise to finally arrive at Duke and realize just how different it was from the community he left behind.

“It was a little bit of a culture shock when I first got here, all these different people and stuff,” he said. “It really did open my worldview. When you grow up in a small town, it’s hard to know what the rest of the world is like.”

But Duke allowed him to see that, he said.

“There’s people from all over the world,” Lovett said. “I can name friends from 40 different countries that I know here. There’s just an interesting culture where everyone is really passionate and ambitious. I have friends getting their Ph.D. and going to medical school, and it’s just a great place for people who want to grow and see the world.”

About Fulbright

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to build lasting connections between the people of U.S. and the people of other countries. Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has given more than 380,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, professionals and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.

Lovett will be one of more than 1,900 U.S. citizens who will conduct research, teach English and provide expertise abroad for the 2018–2019 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement as well as record of service and leadership potential in their respective fields.

Fulbright alumni have achieved distinction in many fields, including 59 who have been awards the Nobel Prize, 82 who have received the Pulitzer Prize and 37 who have served as a head of state or government.