When Julia Henke ’22 arrived in Nepal for her Fulbright, the little things surprised her the most. “The lack of standardization for the height of stairs, even, spotlights right away that the sort of things we take for granted are actually just societal expectations.” The community members in the Nepalese village where Julia taught for nine months guided her in everything as big as how to speak Nepali to as little as how to give a simple present.

Before heading to Nepal, Julia had completed her undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at Brown and spent most of a year working as a professional engineer. She began her Fulbright, teaching English in Nepal, in March 2023. Julia returned to the United States this January to resume work as a biomedical engineer in California. 

Julia always knew she would return to biomedical engineering after her time in Nepal, but she wanted the chance to “have a life experience” and a Fulbright seemed like the perfect way to do just that. “It can be really scary to leave the path and go,” she said. “If you look at the course of my life, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. But nonetheless, it was something that I knew I was going to do.”

“It felt a lot more human:” Why BME at Brown?

Julia immigrated from Germany to Wisconsin at five. Her family didn’t know much about navigating the American college system, but she knew Brown’s biomedical engineering program was strong and that she wanted to explore outside of Wisconsin. “I liked bio, I liked chem, I liked physics, I liked math,” she said. “I was ready to do just about anything.” Not quite certain what she wanted to do after graduating college and aware that Brown was a great place to engage with all of her interests, Julia shipped off to Rhode Island. 

“Biomedical engineering is the thing you do when you want to do everything,” Julia said. Arriving at Brown, she briefly considered mechanical or chemical engineering. But BME allowed her to learn about all different types of engineering, with a people-centered lens. “In my biomechanics classes, we were thinking about the heart and thinking about arteries and thinking about tissues,” she said. “It just felt a lot more human to me.”

Outside of academics, Julia enjoyed the community she found within engineering. At the end of her senior year, a group of engineering students decided to plan a huge sleepover in Barus and Holley, the home of Brown’s School of Engineering. What was initially an informal get-together transformed into a total event: the students secured funding, ordered pizza, and planned karaoke, hide & seek, and other activities to fill the whole evening with fun. “That was one of the best nights ever,” Julia recalled.

“It really just struck a chord with me:” Pursuing a Fulbright

While knowing she would pursue a career in engineering, Julia always had a passion for teaching. Growing up, Julia’s mom ran an after-school science program where Julia often helped teach. At Brown, she helped mentor Brendan McMahon ’24, who recently received a Fulbright to teach in Taiwan. She had also hoped to study abroad, a plan interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I went to a Fulbright info session,” Julia said. There, she found the idea of a teaching program where you would learn another language from scratch before teaching English to students sounded super appealing. “Nepal — it really just struck a chord with me,” she said. She knew it was far outside her comfort zone — and physically far from her family in the United States and Europe — but that excited her.

At Brown, Julia had been a member of the Engaged Scholars Program. Through that, she took classes on effective volunteering and the dangers of falling into a white savior complex while engaging in work abroad. That program shaped her mindset going into her Fulbright. Despite her qualifications, Julia doubted she would be selected. 

The Fulbright in Nepal starts in March, so Julia lined up a job for the months after graduation. She spent months working as a manufacturing engineer at Boston Scientific — a job she loved. “It was pretty hard to leave.” But Julia knew that her Fulbright was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so she accepted. 

“It’s different every day:” Teaching means expecting the unexpected 

Having never been to Asia, Julia arrived in Nepal in March 2023 eager to learn Nepali and “do my best for my students.” After arriving, she spent a month in Kathmandu for orientation, receiving language and cultural instruction every day. Then, she was dropped off with a host family in rural Nepal to start her work as a teaching assistant.

Soon after her arrival, though, Julia’s primary co-teacher left on maternity leave. “I ended up teaching solo quite a bit which was great, but also a little unexpected,” she said. “It’s a kind of job where you never really know what to expect.” She described it as not unlike her experience as a manufacturing engineer, but simultaneously different in every way. She found herself drawing on lessons she learned at Brown: applying the methods she used learning Spanish to teaching English, using the problem-solving mindset from instrumentation design to develop a mural for the school, and even taking advantage of her tech savvy to build her students a computer lab.

“A lot of people had donated CPUs (computer processing units) to the school and they were sitting in boxes because none of the teachers knew how to interface with them,” Julia said. When she arrived, the school’s computer lab had six computer stations set up but only two even turned on. “I’m lucky to have an education that involved a lot of computers — I did a lot of programming and I know my way around a control panel,” she said. Now, the school has a fully operating computer lab, and older students and teachers can type and make presentations, amongst other things. 

Beyond practically providing her students with tools, Julia aimed to provide them with a creative approach to schooling. “How can I encourage them to have creative thoughts about who they want to be and what they want to do?” she said. “I’m a woman in STEM and obviously I want to support all of my girls who are already doing a lot of work in their households to really go for it at school, and be excited about science if that’s what they want to be excited about.”

“I became a member of a family:” Finding communities across the globe

Outside the classroom, Julia spent most of her time with her host family — who owned a small business where she often helped out. She was particularly close with her host mom, with whom she drank tea “together at dawn every morning and then we’d get ready for the day. That was our thing.” Her host mom “never had a daughter before.”

Julia learned a lot from her host sister, too. “One day I was cutting fruit for a fruit salad for some guests and I was taking out the unripe peaches. My older host sister put them back in the bowl. She was like, ‘they just have a different texture,’” Julia recalled. “I think about that all the time, because if you expect it to taste like a ripe peach you are going to be disappointed. But if you just expect it to be a fruit, you’re going to have a good time.”

Throughout her nine months in Nepal, “I became a member of a family,” Julia said. Leaving was hard. While Julia was grateful to return to heating, air conditioning, traffic laws, and her favorite foods, she deeply missed her students and host family. At the beginning of her Fulbright, “the transition to my Nepali self was pretty gradual,” she said. “The transition back felt really abrupt.” 

Spending time with family in Wisconsin and Germany helped ease the transition, but soon Julia faced another change: moving to California. After hunting for jobs, Julia landed as a manufacturing engineer at a small company that makes ultrasound probe covers and gel. She describes herself as a “jack of all trades engineer,” involved in everything from packaging to research and development. 

“I really do like working a nine-to-five,” Julia said. In her position, she can “design the machines that build things that ultimately will really help people. I’ve had a really great time doing that. And I also have a really great time knowing that I had the opportunity to do a Fulbright and dedicate some of my life to that too.”