Sacramento-area graduate earns Fulbright grant to teach English in France

Rose Goyette had just stayed up all night to finish her UC Berkeley honors thesis about the French poet Charles Baudelaire when an email landed in her inbox, informing her that she had won a Fulbright scholarship to teach in France next year.

“I’m very sleep-deprived and stressed out, and I got this email,” she said. “I was really not expecting it.”

The 21-year-old Arden Arcade native, who last month became a fourth-generation Berkeley graduate, had waited months to hear back from the prestigious program. She had applied to the program in October, independently from her university.

Then she heard from a friend who was a Fulbright scholar in Mexico that the Trump administration had frozen stipend payments for the State Department-affiliated program, casting doubt on its future.

Goyette expected to learn whether she won a Fulbright grant by March or early April, based on what she knew about recipients in past years. But on April 11 she received an email saying that the staff of the Institute of International Education, the organization that manages the Fulbright program, “was furloughed in mid-March.”

It was not until May that Goyette was named an alternate and then a grant winner.

Goyette is now set to spend the bulk of next school year in Lyon, France, helping to teach English at two middle schools. She will be one of 11 Fulbright scholars from across the United States to participate in the Teaching Assistant Program in France, or TAPIF, she said.

“We’re all just kind of star-struck,” her mother, Andrea Todd, said. “We can’t believe it.”

Todd, a writer, teaches journalism at Sacramento Country Day School, but said her daughter’s inspiration to teach came less from her than from one of her own English teachers at St. Francis High School, Emily Kropp.

Goyette recalled looking over a paper she had written her junior year with Kropp, who led interesting discussions in class and encouraged her to study literature in college.

After graduating from St. Francis in 2021 as the valedictorian, Goyette went on to major in both English and comparative literature at Berkeley. During college, she also worked as a reading tutor for local elementary school students.

She first traveled to France last summer for a five-week study abroad program in Paris, which planted the idea to try teaching abroad, too.

“My big goal is to just come into the space and be able to help these students feel more comfortable with expressing themselves in English the way that they would in French,” Goyette said, “whether that means teaching them more slang or figuring out, ‘What do you guys want to talk about?’”

Goyette said she is spending the summer at home in the Sacramento area and then teaching poetry to youngsters at Camp Winnarainbow, a circus and performing arts camp she used to attend.

This story was originally published June 9, 2025 at 2:12 PM.