Fulbright Norway – Winter Seminar

This past Thursday was the annual Winter Seminar for participants of Fulbright Norway. It was held in an auditorium on the University of Oslo campus. My opening stay in Bergen lasted all of four days as I took a flight from Bergen to Oslo Wednesday evening. Oslo is east of Bergen and it is a simple 1-hour flight, with a number of flights occurring throughout the day. I took the train from Oslo-Gardermoen airport into Oslo Centrum, and then the subway to near the hotel, which is not far from the university. Oslo has more of a winter presence to it than Bergen given that it is located further away from the west coast of  Norway. This was quickly noticeable with much colder conditions, snowbanks, and snow/ice covered sidewalks.

The Winter Seminar brings the Fulbright Norway participants together to share updates on how their year has been going and lessons learned during the year. Nearly all of the Fulbright Norway participants arrived in mid-August and their year started with an orientation in Oslo. I did not attend that orientation since I arrived in early February. That also means that I was one of three newbies to the group with everybody else having met each other in August during the orientation.

In my previous post, I provided a breakdown of Fulbright participants from a larger Fulbright national/international perspective. It was not until I listened to all of the presentations on Thursday that I was able to gain a much better understanding of the Fulbright Norway participants. There are 29 people that are a part of Fulbright Norway for the 2025-26 academic year with 26 attending the Winter Seminar. Three of the participants are “English Teaching Assistants” and they are placed at upper schools and colleges in Bergen, Trondheim, and Ås. The English Teaching Assistants are “students” with either having recently graduated college, or they are early in their careers. They work with the teachers and students in their placement schools with English teaching and learning. There are eight participants that are “student researchers”. They are placed at universities across Norway and they are working on research projects with connections between Norway and the United States. They are also taking classes at their universities. The next group is unique to Fulbright Norway and they are referred to as the “Roving Scholars”. The five Rovers are seasoned American educators (elementary to college teachers with years of experience) that hold workshops across Norway for students at all levels of the school systems, as well as their teachers, and those aspiring to be teachers. The Rovers are always on the move as they hold workshops at schools throughout Norway. The “Scholars” are the group that I am a part of with Fulbright Norway and there are ten of us. The Scholars are primarily members of the university community that are in Norway pursuing research projects with Norwegian colleagues. It is this group of participants that have varying length of stays in Norway ranging from two months to the entire academic year. There were two other Scholars that were similar to me with having just recently arrived in Norway and were not present at the orientation in August. Lastly, it is worth pointing out that six of the participants are located in Bergen, which means even in Bergen there is a small community of Fulbright Norway.

Each of the 26 Fulbright Norway participants presented on what they have been doing and learning from the year. The groups were roughly organized by field of study and interests. I was in the opening group with a focus on the natural sciences. In addition to my presentation on my upcoming work in looking at extremes in temperature and precipitation, there were presentations on investigating microplastics in sea ice, the climate record in ocean floor sediment near Svalbard, and carbon dynamics involving fresh-water lake microbes. Given that I had just arrived in Norway, and that I was new to all the other Fulbright Norway participants, I spent about a third of my presentation on introducing myself and my interests, including mentioning my favorite weather phenomena: thundersnow. After our four presentations in the natural sciences, there was a question-and-answer time related to any or all of our presentations. This process repeated itself throughout the Winter Seminar with the presentations being divided into clusters of 3-4 presentations.

One of the advantages for me in attending the Winter Seminar is that it gave me 10 minutes with each of the other Fulbright Norway participants to learn their names and the work they are doing in Norway. Given that they were all new to me this provided me a valuable backdrop and conversation starter for chats and hangout time that we’d have the next three days during the Ski/Snow Retreat. That will be the topic of my next post that I hope to share tomorrow. That post will also include some amazing photos of Norway.

As a quick housekeeping item, is that it is worth sharing that this has been my third post. If you have missed any of the others, you can find them posted collectively at: https://megamemoirs.com/