MDC Alumnus Selected For Year-Long Fellowship In Germany

North Campus Honors College alumnus Apollinaire Sebastian Mendoza has been chosen for the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange in Germany. 

The year-long fellowship, which begins this month, consists of a two-month German language training in Saarbrücken, an internship and a semester at a university, where he will be taking political science courses.

“[This fellowship] is a way for me to get out of the bubble,” Mendoza said. “I’ve been lucky enough [to] know English and Spanish, but learning a third language [would allow me to] understand so many more people.”

At North Campus, Mendoza conducted research on the assimilation of Ukrainian immigrants in Miami and on the difference between California and Florida’s history textbooks. The latter was published in the Macksey Journal, an academic journal at Johns Hopkins University. 

Outside of Miami Dade College, the 20-year-old served as a teaching fellow at Miami Country Day School last summer, where he taught social sciences to 8th graders and writing to 5th and  8th graders. 

Mendoza, who graduated with an associate’s degree in international relations from MDC in April, will transfer to Pomona College in Claremont, California, in August of 2025 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in international relations. He aspires to become a lawyer specializing in immigration.