"Are you from Chicago? Are you from New York City?"

She is not. She's from Du Quoin, Illinois — and what follows isn't what they expect.

She talks about Friday night football games, about Halloween (which Finns don't really celebrate), about homecoming traditions so specific that she once gave a full presentation about them to North American studies students at the University of Turku. She told them the University of Missouri invented homecoming. She talked about what it looked like growing up in Du Quoin.

"I talk about the Midwest, and you can kind of see their eyes go big," she says.

Emily is in Finland on a Fulbright Scholarship, one of the most competitive international fellowships administered by the U.S. Department of State. The program funds graduate students abroad while enlisting them as cultural ambassadors — sharing their own experience as much as absorbing someone else's.

"They are enlisting me as a kind of citizen ambassador," she says. "It's meant to foster cultural exchange."

For Emily, that exchange is personal in both directions. She represents the United States. But she also represents something more specific.

"I see it as a way not only to represent the U.S., but also to represent my community," she says.

That community shaped her in ways she's still tracing. Emily graduated from Du Quoin High School in 2021 — pandemic class, nearly. Her father teaches there. Her grandmother on her dad's side worked as an aide. Her grandmother on her mom's side taught French at the high school. Education wasn't just part of her upbringing. It was the household.

"I come from a teacher's family," she says.

Two teachers in particular told her something she held onto: Mrs. Lantzy, and then again Ms. Templeton in middle school, told Emily she was a good writer. It connected to something deeper — her grandfather, John Croessman, who spent his career as editor of the Du Quoin Evening Call.

"I initially wanted to be a journalist like my grandpa," she says.

That goal took her to the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, one of the most respected programs in the country. There, she added political science and began thinking less about writing the story and more about protecting the conditions that make stories possible — freedom of expression, First Amendment law, the infrastructure of a free press.

She scored a 171 on the LSAT. She was accepted to Notre Dame Law School on a scholarship. Then the Fulbright came through, and she deferred.

Now, with a year in Helsinki on her résumé, she's thinking bigger. "Maybe now that I have the Fulbright in my pocket, I was able to crack the top 20," she says. "So maybe I'll get into a top 10 law school going forward."

In May, she's giving a Fulbright speaker series presentation — her topic is the importance of local journalism in America. Funding pressures. How newsrooms are adapting. The civic role of the community newspaper.

"He's been on the mind a lot while I've been making that," she says of her grandfather.

In January, Emily opened a time capsule she had made in eighth grade in Mr. Crain's class — sealed for ten years, just came due. She read the letter she'd written to herself. Reviewed her list of goals. Some she'd hit, some she hadn't.

"I think my eighth-grade self would be pretty proud of where I've ended up," she says.

She lives now in Lauttasaari, an island neighborhood in the southern part of Helsinki, twenty minutes from the main train station. On Sunday evenings, she makes calls back home.

She is asked, in conversation, whether her path happened in spite of coming from a small town in southern Illinois. She pushes back on the framing immediately.

"I think the misconception is people think it's in spite of," she says. "But it is in fact because of."

She hopes some student somewhere hears that — in Du Quoin or in Finland — and understands what it means.

"If nothing happens except for them hearing about it and hearing that it's an option for them as well," she says, "then I will have thought that this is worth it."