UW-Platteville star alum Agiimaa Kerwin earns Fulbright funds to teach English in native Mongolia

Agii knows she has a shot at whatever she tries. There's not, 'is this a good idea?' If she has it in her mind, it's going to happen.

-Dr. Caryn Stanley on Agiimaa Kerwin 

UW-Platteville alumna Agiimaa Kerwin has a habit of beating the odds.

Abandoned as an infant in Mongolia's capital city, she spent almost two years in an orphanage before a Wisconsin family adopted her. She grew up in Neenah and played high school football before eventually choosing to attend UW-Platteville. Through grit and determination, Agii (pronounced like "Maggie" without the 'm'), graduated summa cum laude from the College of Business, Industry, Life Sciences and Agriculture this spring with a degree in supply chain management.

But her international heritage has never been far from her mind. Just weeks before graduation, Agii beat the odds again, becoming one of just eight U.S. citizens selected to serve as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Mongolia. She returned to her home country in August for the first time since she was an infant to start a 10-month assignment, giving her students the same opportunities higher education gave her.

"There's definitely an appreciation and feeling being here that I have not felt before," Agii wrote in an email to a reporter in late September. "Although I am still early in my journey here, I strongly believe with every little interaction my connections grow stronger."

'I'm a warrior'

It's been a full-circle journey for Agii, who's lucky to even have survived as an infant. Her adoptive father, Phil Kerwin, said he and his wife, Alyssa Dudkowski, were looking to adopt internationally when they learned through Lutheran Social Services of a baby found abandoned in the stairwell of an Ulaanbaatar tenement. The infant had a note on her chest: "This is my daughter, Agiimaa. She is two months old. Please take care of her."

The couple traveled to Ulaanbaatar and met Agii in an orphanage. She was just 20 months old and shy. When the other kids charged forward to play with the couple, Agii hung back, Phil Kerwin said. 

Agii eventually warmed up to the couple, and they spent a few hours playing with her on the floor. Then officials hustled the Americans out, sending them on horseback rides on the steppe and treating them to authentic Mongolian food and cultural performances, all with the hope that the couple would tell their new daughter about her native land. The couple ultimately adopted her during a Mongolian tea ceremony in 2005 while wearing traditional Mongolian garb, Phil Kerwin said, and after consulting with their two sons, decided not to change Agii's name. 

"(The country) will always consider her a daughter of Mongolia," Phil Kerwin said. 

Agii grew up as part of the Kerwin family in Neenah, but she learned an appreciation for her heritage from an early age, with her adoptive brothers constantly telling her that she was tough because she descended from Genghis Khan. Phil Kerwin recalled that once during a trip to Disney World, a clerk at the family's hotel asked 7-year-old Agii if she wanted to be a princess. 

"I'm a warrior," Agii replied. 

The clerk suggested Agii could be a warrior princess like Mulan, who joins the Chinese army in its fight against invading Huns during what is likely the Northern Wei Dynasty. Open mouth, insert foot: Agii shot back that she was Mongolian and Mulan fought against her people. 

Historians generally believe the Huns may have originated from the nomadic people who inhabited the Mongolian steppe, although the exact relationship is still up for debate.

Regardless, Agii lived up to the warrior moniker, earning a third-degree black belt and joining the football team at St. Mary's Catholic High School as a kicker. She took down the returner on her first kickoff, leaving her father shocked at how hard she could hit.

"She's 4-foot-11," Phil Kerwin said, "but no one was going to return one of her kicks for a touchdown."

On to UW-Platteville: Clubs, camaraderie and caring

When the time came to choose a college, Agii surprised everyone by choosing UW-Platteville over UW-Madison and Marquette University. She said UW-Platteville's size appealed to her; she could join clubs, work in small classes and her professors would know her name. 

That's exactly what happened. Agii left her mark, joining the robotics club and the American Marketing Association. She got a job as a student technician at the Huff Family Innovation Center, the university's showcase production facility for woodworking, metalworking, 3D printing and video production, and for two years she manufactured the family's Christmas presents there, Phil Kerwin said.

"Everything just clicked (at UW-Platteville)," he said. 

One of her more memorable experiences came in January 2025, when she and a group of UW-Platteville business students traveled to Panama to help villagers develop supply chains. Agii worked with an artisan on ways to market his soapstone carvings, helping him set up a stand at a resort gift shop. 

During that trip she became close with Dr. Caryn Stanley in the School of Business. Stanley recalled that college wasn't always easy for Agii because she had to learn when to rein in her boundless energy. 

"She's somebody whose energy fills a room," Stanley said. "A smile always on her face, willing to jump in and do whatever's asked, plus more. She was in my team dynamics class, and one of the course outcomes is to be a good teammate. That's really hard for some people, and she ended up with a team that did not gel. She had to learn, 'I don't always need to lead, sometimes I need to follow.'"

Fulbright push

Agii's parents had planned to take her back to visit Mongolia but the trip fell apart as COVID-19 took hold. So Agii took matters into her own hands. During the summer before her senior year at UW-Platteville, she began the process to apply for a Fulbright grant to teach English in her native country. 

The Fulbright program is the U.S. government's prestigious international educational exchange program, offering U.S. students funding to study, conduct research or teach English abroad. Alumni include Pulitzer Prize-winning authors John Updike and Eudora Welty, writers John Steinbeck and Sylvia Plath, acclaimed opera soprano Renee Fleming and multiple Nobel Prize winners.

"I wanted to have an experience after college that was meaningful," Agii wrote in her email. "I had also always planned on visiting Mongolia after graduation to see where I came from. I then was brainstorming ways to combine those two goals."

The chances of winning a Fulbright grant are exceedingly slim; only one out of five applicants receive funding, according to ProFellow, an online database of professional and academic fellowships and awards. 

But this was Agii. 

"Agii knows she has a shot at whatever she tries," Stanley said. "There's not, 'is this a good idea?' If she has it in her mind, it's going to happen. The connection and her drive being so personal to Mongolia, that's a unique angle for her."

The application process was grueling, Stanley said, demanding multiple essays and letters of recommendation. Agii learned in January that she was a semi-finalist, and on April 6, a little more than a month before she would serve as the senior speaker at the BILSA graduation ceremony, she got the letter she was waiting for: She was going to Mongolia to teach.

"Getting the final 'yes' feels like a weight lifted off my shoulders," Agii wrote on her Facebook page on the day she received the letter. "Please send warm thoughts. I've heard those winters are no joke!"

New world, new connections

Agii wrote in her email that she'd been in-country for about a month and a half teaching at the Erdenet Institute of Technology, a university in Erdenet, a city of about 112,000 people in northern Mongolia. She said that she's struggling to learn the Mongolian language, particularly because she's working with the Cyrillic alphabet, but she's improving and she loves helping her students.

"Right now, it feels very rewarding to hear the lives of my students and their own motivations to attend college and learn English. Living in Mongolia, it's been cool to just connect with the local citizens in my day-to-day life. Like cab drivers who know little English but still want to learn about me and why I am here."

She said that she draws on her experience at UW-Platteville as a teacher, incorporating the same hands-on approach and problem-solving skills she learned here.

"My classes at UW-Platteville always felt like we were a community," she wrote. "I have tried to mirror that within my own classroom. Especially when students are nervous to speak and make a mistake. It's important to create a supportive classroom environment, just like at Platteville."

Back home in Wisconsin, her parents couldn't be prouder.

"You're ecstatic when your kids succeed and do it on their own," Phil Kerwin said. "This is what we're hoping for. They don't need mom or dad hovering in the background. That's the goal. She's not afraid. She's a tough cookie. Always has been. UW-Platteville should be proud of making her the student she is."