Fulbright Gives Alumna Extraordinary Opportunity

Leigh Brooks ’18 in Ghorki-Terelj National Park, east of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, where she works as an English language teaching assistant. Mongolia is known as "the land of the eternal blue sky." Photo courtesy of Leigh Brooks.

Leigh Brooks loves languages.

The 2018 George Stevens Academy graduate excelled in French while at GSA, and after graduating last year from Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., she is “comfortable” in Russian, Mandarin, Spanish, and Turkish, and knows “bits and bobs of others,” she said.

Leigh can’t say for sure where her interest comes from, but “different languages have always been around me,” she said, “and somewhere along the line, I discovered that I found them captivating and beautiful.”

They are puzzles to be solved, she added. “You pick them apart and figure out what’s going on and put all the bits and pieces together. And they’re also just really fun to say.”

She must be all smiles, then. In January, Leigh left the relatively balmy Maine for Mongolia, where she is now a Fulbright English teaching assistant in the English Department at the National University of Mongolia.

She arrived in the capital city Ulaanbaatar in the coldest part of winter, when temperatures typically range from a low of -20° F to a high of -4°. She came prepared with everything she thought she’d need for the cold, but also knew she could buy winter gear in-country. “Wool is a big business,” she said. “They have tons of wool-producing animals, so you can just go buy enough wool to wrap yourself up like a little Michelin man.”

Leigh also arrived academically prepared for the post. At Wheaton, she triple-majored in linguistics, Russian language and literature, and European history, and she had firsthand experience with a Fulbright language teaching assistant.

“In college, we had an agreement with Fulbright to get a Russian-speaking person to work with our Russian department,” she said. “Russian and English are not very similar, so having somebody help you with things like pronunciation and slang terms is really helpful.”

That’s one way she is helping people in Ulaanbaatar. “Because Mongolia is fairly isolated and there are not a lot of people coming from English-speaking countries to Mongolia, we’re kind of a valuable resource just by the virtue that we are native speakers of the English language.”

While Leigh helps students in Ulaanbaatar master English, she is pursuing her own language goals. She hopes to be fluent in Mongolian within six months so she can take a history class in the language. She also hopes to work on her Russian, which is spoken by a lot of Mongolians because of historical Soviet influence, she said.

“Besides the languages, I’m really excited to get outside into all the wilderness areas and stuff,” Leigh said. “I like hiking, bird-watching. Mongolia has some really cool geologic features that I really want to get a good look at. There’s a national park nearby, and you can get there pretty easily by bus.”

So how is it going? “It’s wonderful,” she said. “I really love the city, and the people I’m working with are amazing.”

Why Mongolia?

“The language itself is super interesting,” Leigh said. “It’s really pretty. It’s got really cool sounds and very interesting patterns, and therefore, I’d really like to speak it.”

And Mongolia was a natural fit considering her academic interests. Leigh’s senior thesis at Wheaton was about specific aspects of “relations between Russia and China in the Communist period,” she said. Living in Ulaanbaatar, she is in the perfect place to learn how Mongolia, which sits between Russia and China, fared at that time, “especially in terms of language.”

But ultimately, she chose the landlocked nation more than 6,000 miles from home “because how else are you going to get there, you know? The Fulbright makes it easier to get to places you couldn’t really get to otherwise. It would be too difficult to try to settle in a country like Mongolia as a single person with no support system.”

Leigh Brooks '18 signs her contract at the National University of Mongolia.

Photo courtesy of Leigh Brooks.