“I think it’s such political theater to attack a very important scholarship. This is a shame for all people who are already on the program—in different countries or in the U.S.—or who are applying now,” Chloe Hunt (C ’25) says, with a little laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. She’s a semifinalist for the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Program, and she’s been a semifinalist for about four months now. She hasn’t heard anything of substance since she received the offer in January, the program pushing the announcement deadline further and further back.
“They said, ‘Oh, you should hear early April.’ And then early April passed, and another email, ‘You should hear mid–April,’” she says. Now it’s May, graduation is on the horizon, and Chloe has been left in limbo as to what will happen after she tosses that grad cap into the air.
Don’t get it wrong, Chloe can handle change—that’s what allowed her to fully switch her major in the spring of her junior year from political science to English, with a concentration in creative writing. “Penn is a unique place where sometimes students forget their passions,” she says. “I knew that I loved writing, and I loved political science. I just didn’t think that I could be a writer.” But Chloe found that her writing classes were where she really thrived, and her joy for the subject outweighed any perceived risk of pursuing a creative major.
Her new pursuit of her passions didn’t stop there. Now, Chloe will be graduating with not only her newly minted English degree, but also a triple minor in hispanic studies, international relations, and political science. Chloe’s interests never aligned perfectly with one major, but this hodgepodge collection of programs gave her the freedom to explore the topics she desired. “I feel like all of the different kinds of minors and my major fit together well, because I get to write about stuff that I really care about, but also do the creative side.”
Chloe has found her niche at Penn, using her writing as an avenue to explore all of her interests, from sports (Chloe used to write for The Daily Pennsylvanian Sports section and is a part of the club tennis team) to United States and Latin American politics.
As much as she might’ve let herself be sucked into the creative side of things, she ultimately finds herself drawn to the world of politics; she did, after all, come in as a political science major and has always had a staunch interest in the scene. Through her experiences organizing, she’s experienced every side of the aisle—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Chloe reminisces on a childhood filled with political endeavors: “I always loved politics from a young age. I think I’m very grateful that my mom instilled in me how important civic awareness and engagement are. Every single night, instead of talking over dinner, we’d watch the NBC Nightly News. I wasn’t really allowed to talk until the segment was finished, and then we would talk about what we thought.” From there, Chloe was hooked.
In 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for president, 12–year–old Chloe volunteered for her campaign. In her home city of Roanoke, Va., Chloe would knock on car windows and doors with her fellow volunteers, most of them far older than her. In high school, she started a political alliance in southwest Virginia for young voters to encourage civic engagement—“We had, like, 600 students in the area, which I was really proud of.”
Chloe was geared up and ready to get into the political scene at Penn, but she quickly became disillusioned by what she found. Penn is a place known for pushing people into boxes, and she found the political scene here to be no different: “Some moments I thought I was too far right for Democrats or too far left for Republicans. I didn’t really know where to fit into that.”
During her first–year fall, Chloe attended both Penn Democrats and Penn College Republicans meetings, making friends on both sides and engaging in constant debate. “I guess just that intellectual kind of culture at Penn forced me to think outside of my party definitions.” For Chloe, being able to challenge her own ideas and preserve her “intellectual humility” was very important.
That spring, she settled into College Republicans, eventually serving as their vice president before ultimately parting ways. “I was involved until the most recent election. I still cherish all those friendships and really love a lot of people that I met, but I think the party is not the most current leader,” she says. “When you conflate those things, you can lose yourself.”
Last semester, Chloe watched the presidential election from the outside—literally. She was in Argentina as the results came in. After participating in Penn’s Global Research & Internship Program the summer after her sophomore year, where she worked at a public policy think tank in Argentina, she decided to take a gap semester and return—this time as a freelance journalist. “I didn’t want to leave college without feeling like I did something meaningful that wasn’t necessarily through Penn,” she says. She describes how engrossed she became in many of the women she was profiling, as well as in the Latin American politics that became a part of her everyday life.
But she had conflicting feelings about being abroad, surrounded by people not tuned into U.S. politics the way a citizen is, during a momentous election season. On one hand, she says, “Hearing their kind of impression of U.S. politics was quite interesting. And I think it also got me thinking more about what America’s role internationally should look like.” But on the other hand, as someone who had spent nearly a decade entrenched in U.S. politics, she felt suddenly uninvolved and isolated. “I think overall, I wish I had been more active in this election, and that’s going to be a huge regret of mine for a long time.”
Chloe rambles through her thoughts, her feelings, and the turmoil she and everyone else she knows have been going through. She’s quick to acknowledge that she’s in a better situation than most—“I am lucky, I think, compared to other students that are in limbo, that I could always go home whenever I wanted”—but that doesn’t deflate the disappointment she’s felt for her own future. “I mean, if [Fulbright] comes through, I think I would definitely do it. But it is stressful to consider that even if I do accept a full ride and it pans out, that it could still be jeopardized after that if they attack the State Department in some way,” she says. “So I think even if it pans out, I’m not too optimistic, which is a shame.”
In the meantime, the soon–to–be graduate is weighing all her options. She’s letting herself fall down the rabbit hole of writing, considering two different graduate programs: New York University’s master of fine arts program in nonfiction and the University of Virginia’s master of fine arts program, which has the added bonus of being close to home. But she’s also holding out hope for a return to Argentina. Though she might not have the financial stability that Fulbright could’ve offered her, she’s built her own connections and network, and she’s found that freelance journalism might be the most stable opportunity for her now.
