W&L’s Mariam Drammeh ’25 Selected for U.S. Teaching Assistantship to Austria Drammeh will teach English in Austria before beginning graduate school at Duke University.
Washington and Lee University graduate Mariam Drammeh ’25 has been awarded a U.S. Teaching Assistantship (USTA) to teach English in Austria. At W&L, Drammeh double majored in cognitive and behavioral science and German. Drammeh is from Lawrenceville, Georgia, and graduated from the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology.
The USTA Program is administered by Fulbright Austria on behalf of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research. Teaching assistants are placed in secondary schools throughout Austria to teach English language and linguistic skills, serve as informal cultural ambassadors and promote mutual understanding between the United States and Canada.
Drammeh also received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) to teach English in Germany, declining the ETA to accept the USTA. She was inspired to apply for both opportunities because she plans to pursue a career at the intersection of academic and community-based work, with an emphasis on refugee work. With understanding language access as one of the greatest barriers that refugees face when integrating into a new country, Drammeh is eager to learn more methods for teaching English as a second language to Austrian schoolchildren, gaining skills that will apply to her future work with refugee settlement and integration.
“Being awarded both the Fulbright and the USTA means the world to me,” Drammeh said. “I’ve dreamed about being awarded a Fulbright since I started learning German in high school, and the fact I was awarded both the Fulbright and the USTA has been such a surreal and blissful experience. I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity, and the high school version of me is surely in tears right now at the idea that I achieved one of my greatest dreams.”
Drammeh appreciates the support she has received from her faculty mentors who have “poured so much light into [her] life,” including Karla Murdock, the Jo M. and James M. Ballengee Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Science; Wythe Whiting, professor of cognitive and behavioral science; Elliott King, professor of art history; and Mohamed Kamara, department head and the H. Laurent Boetsch, Jr. Term Professor of Romance Languages. She is also grateful for the community she found at W&L who created countless impactful experiences during her four years on campus.
“I was so blessed to have the opportunity to connect with people on every level of campus, and I have made connections who have impacted my life for the better and made me a more caring and compassionate human being,” she said.
At W&L, Drammeh served as head of the Peer Counseling Program (now the Peer Connections Program) and was the young ambassador to the German Academic Exchange Service, a senior peer tutor and vice chair of the Traveller Safe Ride Program. She was a research assistant in the Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Science and the Department of Art History and volunteered with Languages for Rockbridge. She also received W&L’s 2024 David G. Elmes Pathfinder Prize in Psychology, which recognized her extraordinary promise in cognitive and behavioral science or its application in professions through outstanding scholarship in basic or applied psychology.
With the USTA, Drammeh will depart in September 2025 for her nine-month program. Upon completion of the program, Drammeh will pursue a Master of Public Policy at Duke University, with special interests in social policy and refugee rights. She plans to then pursue her doctorate in sociology or public policy.
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