Clifton's Fulbright Scholar

CHS '04 Kathleen Bakarich is studying in Germany

Story by Jordan Schwartz

A Nobel Peace Prize winner, the President of Brown University and the Chairman of the Board at Intel Corporation are just some of the previous recipients of the Fulbright U.S. Student scholarship.

This year, 2004 Clifton High School alum Kathleen Bakarich joins this prestigious group.
The recent Fairfield University grad left in August for an 11-month stay in Germany, where she will be doing research and taking classes in international accounting and European Union business at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt.

“I’ve always been interested in the international side of business and I studied German for four years at CHS,” said Bakarich in an interview conducted before she left.

The School 3 and Christopher Columbus Middle School alum is one of more than 1,450 Americans who are traveling abroad for the 2008-2009 academic year through the Fulbright program.

The most recent Cliftonite to receive the award was Carlos Lopez, who went to Australia in 2005.
Bakarich wrote her thesis at Fairfield on the political and social factors that affected German accounting after WWII and throughout the second half of the 1900s. She then expanded this research to propose studying the impact the EU has had on the country’s accounting for her Fulbright trip.

“The trip is a great opportunity to just see other cultures and other ways of doing business,” she said. “It’s a way to gain more experience with a different perspective of where business and people are coming from.”

When Bakarich returns next summer, she will begin her job at RSM McGladrey, a public accounting firm in New York City.

She’d like to eventually get her MBA and work abroad in the international side of accounting.
Bakarich graduated third in her class from CHS, where she also played outside hitter on the volleyball team.

At Fairfield, she was a member of the Jesuit Honor Society, Business Honor Society, and Foreign Language Honor Society. She graduated Summa Cum Laude with the highest GPA in the Charles F. Dolan School of Business Kathleen was also involved in community service, spending one spring break in Portland, Maine with eight classmates, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. In addition, she was an officer in the Accounting Club, helped with Office of Admissions’ events, and was an accounting tutor.