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Fulbright Program: U.S. Applicant Podcast

Transcript For: Alumni Roundtable - Western Hemisphere

Jody Dudderar hosts an Alumni Roundtable for the Western Hemisphere. Alumini featured are Sam Raneri, Afreen Akhteer, Linda Evarts, Bryan Muir, Sylvia Ciborowsky and Natalia Ksiezyk.

Western Hemisphere Part I

Jody: I’d like to welcome you all to the second annual Western Hemisphere Alumni Roundtable for the U.S. Student Program. My name’s Jody Dudderar; I am the Assistant Director of the U.S. Student Programs at the Institute Of International Education. The Institute Of International Education is the organization that administers the U.S. Student Fulbright Program on behalf of the U.S. State Department. I’d like to start this by introducing our participants in tonight’s session. First of all we have Collen Moffett, who is the Program Officer in U.S. Student Programs office for Central America and the Caribbean and also manages the Critical Language Enhancement Awards for Chile and Critical Language Enhancement Awards are not eligible for the Western Hemisphere countries because that’s not considered a critical language. Collen, to you have anything you want to say?

Collen: Okay. I’d just like to welcome you all here, and hope that you all find some good information regarding the Fulbright Program.

Jody. Okay. Our participants in tonight’s session, I’m just going to briefly state their names and then later on they’re going to be talking; they’ll tell you a little bit more about themselves. I’m not going to give bios. First, I’m going to start to my right. We have Sam Raneri, who studied Latin America studies in Mexico. Next we have Afreen Akhteer, and I pronounced that wrong again. Akhter. Who studied drama in Jamaica. To my left we have Linda Evarts, who studied Journalism in Columbia. And finally we have Bryan Muir, who studied Economic Development in Argentina. In the Houston office I’m just going to mention who they are and you’ll be seeing them a little bit later, but we have Sylvia Ciborowsky who studied Political Science in Peru, and finally Natalia Ksiezyk, and I’m sorry about your name; I should have checked earlier. But Natalia was an ETA, an English language Teaching Assistant, in Argentina. Before we get started I want to tell you a little bit about what we’re going to be doing tonight. This is a new format for the U.S. Student Program. That is, normally in guidance sessions we talk to you about the technical knots and bolts aspect of the application process. It’s talking heads; it’s people from IIE, IIE staff, giving wonderful words of wisdom about the process. But the alumni roundtable is a little bit different. We have alumni here who are going to talk about their experiences both as applicants in applying for Fulbright grants to the Western Hemisphere, but also focusing on their own experiences as Fulbright grantees. And we hope that this information and this discussion, this dialogue with grantees, will help you as you think about developing your own projects, on making decisions about what to do with your projects. Perhaps even at this stage you might be thinking about what country you want to study in, what country you want to apply for. We recognize that you’re at the early stages of your application process, so we want you to use this time with actual former grantees to talk about the experience, because we think that can help you in the application process that you’re going to be engaging in over the next several months. What we’ll do, is the format for tonight is I’m going to give you a little bit of background about the Fulbright Program, just to kind of lay the groundwork, and then I’m going to turn it over to our alumni to spend about five to seven minutes talking about their experiences individually. We’re leaving plenty of time at the end for your questions, and we hope that your questions will be directed toward the alumni to get them to elaborate more on how they thought about the Fulbright Program when they were sitting in chairs such as you are, anywhere between three and four years ago. But also what it means to be a Fulbrighter. You can ask questions as broadly as you like. If they get too specific and it’s something that I need to respond to, I’ll probably ask that you save it and send me an e-mail, because I want to use these wonderful resources that we have here as much as possible. Let’s start with just an overview of the Fulbright Program. Hopefully you all have been to our website and have read all of the wonderful information that we provide you, but just in case I wanted to kind of mention a few aspects about this program. The U.S. Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship education and cultural exchange program. The program was established in 1946. The purpose of the program was to try to foster mutual understanding between peoples of the United States and people of other countries. The program, this particular program, and many of the Fulbright programs, are sponsored by the U.S. State Department. And they’re sponsored in cooperation with Fulbright Commissions in the host countries, the countries that you’ll be going to in many cases. In smaller countries they’re sponsored in cooperation with U.S. Embassies in these programs, in these countries. As I mentioned, IIE administers the program on behalf of the State Department, which basically means we disseminate any information about the program, we handle the application process, we run the competition that actually helps select candidates who will be moved forward to the host countries for final selection, decision making and selection. We also will work with you, if you are selected as a grantee we’ll work with you in pre-departure issues, and to a certain extent will help you while you’re overseas with some of the logistical aspects of grant administration. While the focus of the Fulbright Program is on cultural exchange, the means for facilitating this exchange is through an academic study or research project. This is an important, these are important distinctions to make, because the Fulbright Program builds itself not just as a typical exchange program; it’s just not another study abroad program. It’s also a cultural exchange, and we do emphasize this, and I know our alumni will talk quite a bit to you about ways they engaged in their host communities, because this aspect of Fulbright, this people to people exchange, is a very, very important aspect of the program. It’s also an aspect which describes, or helps explain a kind of funny little quirk about this Fulbright Program, and that is it’s primarily designed to provide opportunities for people to live and study in countries with which they have little or no experience. And this prior experience issue comes up constantly. If you have lived in Chile for two years as a graduate student, you should not be applying to Chile; you would not be competitive. We feel the Fulbright Program should be an opportunity to learn about a new and different culture, so we will come to that time and again, especially for those of you who do have experience, extensive experience, in the country to which you are applying. What I always recommend, everybody’s situation is a little bit different, I would be happy to talk to you about that individually if you have concerns about your prior experience in the host country. And keep in mind this is the host country; it’s not foreign experience in general. If you have lived abroad for a number of years, that’s okay as long as it’s not in the country to which you are applying. Quickly, the U.S. Student Program, this is the program we’re talking about tonight, the Fulbright program we’ll be talking about tonight, is open to recent university and college graduates. In other words, you could be a graduating senior and apply for this program, you could be a graduate student, you could be a graduate with a BA degree in the performing or creative or visual arts, and finally you could be a young professional. And by that we mean you could have been out of school for three or four years working in the community, working in business, working in schools. This program is open to a wide range of people. You do not need to be currently enrolled in a university graduate program in order to apply for the Fulbright Program. The program is designed for one year of self designed research or study. With the exception of the English Teaching Assistantship Program that we will talk about toward the end of tonight’s program, most of you will be developing your own project, and in the Western Hemisphere that is particularly true. With the exception of the Mexican Graduate Degree Program, you would not necessarily be enrolling in full time graduate - you would not be enrolling in full time graduate study, let me put it that way. You may be enrolling in coursework, you may be conducting independent research, you may be working for an NGO for which you’re doing a particular project or particular research, but you design the program, and this project design really forms the basis of your application. We’re not going to talk about your particular project tonight, but we’re going to talk about how projects get designed, we’re going to talk about the projects in a very, very broad sense, mainly because every project is different. We can’t go into the details about a particular project because it’s not going to be meaningful to you. But we’ll talk about process, and that perhaps will help you as you develop your project statements. I mentioned English Language Teaching Assistantships. They’re currently being offered in I think thirty six countries around the world. The ETA Program, as we call it, is basically a program where grantees who apply for the ETA Program talk about their background and experience for being teaching assistants in whether it’s universities, schools, or communities. In the Western Hemisphere we currently have ETA programs in five countries. We have just added Columbia to the roster of countries where we’ll have ETA programs in 2008-2009. We’ll have about forty two ETA grants in the Western Hemisphere in these six countries, and they are very, very competitive. Last year for the forty grants that we offered we had over three hundred and fifty applications. The ETA Program is one of the most competitive in the world in the Western Hemisphere. The Fulbright Program currently receives about seven thousand applications for fifteen hundred grants, and they’re offered in all fields and disciplines. You can study in one of a hundred and forty countries around the world, so it’s a big program, a lot of opportunity. When you start looking at the Fulbright Program you might be a little bit overwhelmed, but your presence here tonight indicates I hope that most of you have at least focused on the world region to which you are going to apply, and hopefully the country to which you are going to apply, because this is a program that’s country specific. You don’t apply to three different countries and hope you get into one of them. You apply to one country with one project with one application. In the Western Hemisphere there is a small exception: we do entertain applications from multi-country grants. That is, if you’ve got a project that is best carried out in two or three countries, it will be considered. However, I will mention that multi-country grants are a little more difficult to get because there has to be a very strong rationale for why you need to do this project in more than one country, and then you need to go through the application process and selection process for all of the countries to which you are applying. One country doesn’t like it or doesn’t feel it’s compelling, it could effect the feasibility of your project overall and your chances for getting the grant. If you’re considering a multi-country grant I’d urge you to call me if it’s a grant. If it’s a multi-country grant with South America or Mexico call Collen or her person who’s replacing her who will be with the Central America and the Caribbean. Okay? I think I’ve covered everything about what I want to do. I will mention one more thing before we turn it over to the alumni themselves. In the Western Hemisphere South America and Mexico are Spanish speaking countries, and they are countries, and of course Brazil, which is a Portuguese speaking country, but the Spanish speaking countries of Central America and South America and Mexico do require proficiency in Spanish at the time of application. ‘Proficiency’ is defined as the equivalent of two years of college level study. Some of the countries in Latin America may require a higher level of proficiency, or your project may require a higher level of proficiency. Again, if you have questions about proficiency issues in your own personal Spanish speaking background, you’re welcome to talk to Collen or myself about that. You can e-mail us, you can write us, I mean, you can call us. Brazil is a little bit more flexible with the Portuguese language. Portuguese is not as commonly taught in the United States as Spanish, so if you do not have a high level of Portuguese but you do have a high level of Spanish you still could be competitive for a grant to Brazil. If you are thinking of applying to Brazil and do not have a Portuguese language background I urge you to start one as soon as possible. The fact that you’ve begun a study of Portuguese will be enormously helpful in the application process if you’ve never studied it before. And again, I do want to mention a bit about, we have the level of competition for the Western Hemisphere. The Western Hemisphere grants in some countries are among the most competitive in the world, not just for the ETA grants as I mentioned earlier, but also in the Caribbean and Central America. We had about a hundred and eighty applications for forty grants. Some of the countries in Latin America we have about a one to five grant to applicant ratio; five to one applicant to grant ratio, and those are pretty competitive grants. This should not discourage you from applying. As the six people you’ll hear from today, they were all successful in the process, and they’re going to talk a little bit about what made them successful in the process. So I think I’ve talked enough. I’d like to turn it over to our alumni and we’re going to start with Sam Reiniry, who studied in Mexico.

Sam: Of an indigenous woman’s cooperatives in the Sierra Norte region of Puebla Mexico, and I had a research study grant, so my home base was in Mexico City, and the bulk of my research was actually in Puebla Mexico, which I don’t know if any of you are familiar, but it’s about a, well, to where I was it was actually a five hour driving distance. So, anyway, I’m going to talk a little bit about process, as Jody mentioned, but I also want to kind of concentrate on the experience too, so you guys can get an idea of what it’s like to have a Fulbright grant and obviously everybody’s story’s going to be different, but hopefully this will kind of give you a little bit more specificity. One of the first points they ask us to mention is how our project related to our educational or career goals. So I applied as a senior in college, so I was obviously of the youngest that you could possibly be to apply for a grant. I really started thinking about it I would say maybe thinking seriously about it my junior year in college and I began talking to some professors, but mostly kind of, you know, throwing ideas, bouncing ideas around myself, you know, what would I be interested in. Honestly, at that point I felt like I wasn’t focused enough on any one thing to go and study it for a year, never mind to research, field work and stuff. So it was a process, kind of developing those ideas and getting them to be more concrete. But I did and I tried to, you know, really hone down on what issues and well obviously the region, and then what issues I was specifically interested in. So that whole year was filled with the application process, which I’m sure you guys are learning a little bit about right now, in terms of the time table, and then, you know, once I found out about my grant, it was in May of the following year, which was about three, three and a half months before I was supposed to be in Mexico. So for me it was a very short time and I had to kind of get myself together, which, you know, in terms of the process is one of the most hectic times because you’re not sure about what to expect and you’re trying to prepare yourself for which you are at a loss to try to imagine what it’s going to be like. Because after all this planning it’s very hard to envision what your experience is going to be like when you land in your country. So needless to say, my experience came out much differently than I initially put it on paper. It was a very dynamic experience and it involved, day to day I spent half of my time obviously living in Mexico City as where my apartment was, my roommates, and that’s where I was taking graduate classes at UNAM, which is the large public university in Mexico City, and then the other half of my time I was traveling to Puebla and I had a second home, if you will, living with some other students there who were doing service projects while I was doing more research, and so my time was split between those two realms, which, there was an extremely stark contrast between the Mexico City world and living in rural, mountainous Mexico. So I’m going to go back a little bit, sorry. Finding my affiliation. That was like the next part of my process, once I figured out, okay, what am I interested in, where do I want to go, and then they ask us for this affiliation thing and you’re like how do you do this? I started writing e-mails and my rusty Spanish was kind of scary, but I started writing e-mails to people at the university doing online research, just looking up who are these professors, you know, what kind of professor or contact would I want to have here who could like give me some more information. Because basically what my idea, my thinking behind this whole research study grant, was I have a research project I want to do, and this is it. But I don’t just want to go and there and do a research project and not really have a theoretical or knowledge-based foundation to what I’m doing. So I approached it as kind of a supplement and something to give me a very strong base in kind of the field I was going to be working in, which was Latin American studies. So I narrowed it down from there; I contacted people in the Latin American studies department, which still was very big because this university has two hundred and fifty thousand students on its campus, which I think it’s the largest university in the Western Hemisphere. Oh, I have one minute left. Oh my gosh. Okay, I’d better hurry. I was going to try to write a book. So anyway I really want to talk about when I was there one thing I wish I had known, finding living arrangements is hard. But you can do it, don’t get scared. Navigating the university community was scary, as I said, two hundred and fifty thousand students, but it was fun, it was fun, it was just a little, aahh, it was a little daunting. And one of the greatest memories, I’ll end with that, I was trying to think, what was one of my best memories of being there, and that was when I finally got to the point in the year when I had, I worked with a cooperative of women entrepreneurs, so they ran a hotel, like a eco-tourism hotel, an artisan store, and a restaurant. And I got to the point in my relationship with them where they invited me into their homes. And I just, to me that like fulfilled my entire desire to go there, to be invited by people I’ve been working with for six months or more, to finally have them feel comfortable with me and me with them, and that definitely made it worth while.

Jody: Thanks, Sam.

Sam: Sorry, that was kind of long.

Jody: No, that was fine. You wrapped it up well. Akfreen, I’d like you just to go right into it.

Afreen: Hi, my name is Afreen Akhter. I was working in Jamaica; Kingston, Jamaica. My project was essentially to study the conflation of theatre and human rights advocacy in the war and ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica, so essentially what I was doing throughout my time there was co-directing street theatre alongside a collective of women that had been on the ground for thirty years called the Sistren Theatre Collective. In one ghetto in particular kind of town, Kingston, I’ll bring it back a little bit, I think for me deciding what my project was was very easy, just because theatre and human rights advocacy were always like my ‘things’, you know? I had addressed them both separately throughout the entirety of my time up until my senior year in college when I started sort of thinking about this and concocting this project proposal. So the project was a pretty straight forward idea for me. Obviously I had to do a ton of research once I decided that I wanted to apply for this grant, and like, you know, research the Popular Theatre Movement, which is basically the movement of the conflation of theatre and human rights advocacy. What I really wanted to do was field work, and so when I went about selecting an affiliation I was looking for basically grass roots organizations that were on the ground that were doing this work that were still having a meaningful impact in their communities, and that had had a history of impact. So it actually narrowed itself down relatively easily, I mean I did do months of research. But there was this great collective of women called the Sistren Theatre Collective, and I got into touch with them and they were very receptive about sort of taking me under their wing and accepting me and having me engage in this project alongside them. And in the beginning, actually for my project proposal I did have a research component which end up entirely working out because of the logistics of the professor that I had partnered with, but that ended up being entirely fine. I got to Kingston and I started working with the Sistren Theatre Collective, which was a group of women who in the late 1970’s, they were actually street cleaners, came together to form a group that would sort of perform street theatre about the abuses that they suffered at the hands of men, at the hands of an oppressive political system. They had been doing phenomenal work for like, you know, like ten years, and then like they’d had ups and downs and when I sort of entered into their collective they were essentially just solely engaging in outreach work in the ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica is set up really interestingly in that the ghettos are actually all politically aligned and they’re all warring, and Sistren used its work as a means to negotiate peace between these areas so, you know, the pieces would be about socially relevant issues that would go in and it would sort of create a collective of women or children or men, a drama group, and it would create a piece based on the personal experiences and testimonials of the people in, you know, each ghetto about like say gang violence or political tribalism or narcotics trafficking, and then subsequently perform that on the streets of a ghetto, you know, that ghetto, that it was warring with. And actually, this is complicated, but the community leaders of the warring ghetto would request that issue, and then we would perform. And it was, you know, it was great. Let me see if I can actually speak more directly to points that were requested of me. How did the outcome compare to what I initially envisioned it like? Like Sam was saying it’s very, very difficult to really envision what your project is going to be and I would say definitely expect it to be extremely different. I mean, I’m lucky in that I had a partner organization that did take me under its wing and that did significantly shape the scope of my grant and my experience but, you know, when I got there I actually had sort of unluckily or luckily, I’m not sure, positioned my Fulbright in the crux of election season, so you know the first five months of my grant we were having these phenomenal street theatre performances that were well received by the ghettos that we were performing in. I was co-directing, obviously I wasn’t acting in the pieces themselves. But then, you know, as the election season wore on and as the politics grew more rife, you know, people weren’t receptive. We, you know, were dodging from bullets and crazy things like that on a routine basis, so maybe that’s not the best example, but that’s just sort of an example of like, you know, not really, you can never really know what exactly is going to happen to you when you get there. The same time it was really important that that whole the whole situation happened in the middle of election season because I really got to see, you know, I got to see Jamaican peace time, I got to see Jamaican war time, and that was essentially what our street theatre was about, and it was negotiating peace between those two spaces, and so that was great. Discuss ways in which I engaged locally in the community? Like I said I was partnered with Sistren and I went into – there was one ghetto in particular that I grew incredibly close to. It was called Hannastown and, you know, from the onset of my experience there until when I left and to this day I’m still very much in touch with them, and they were a group of women and we, you know, I co-directed them, they had a Hannastown women’s drama group that was already ongoing and I sort of engaged in projects with them. And I also, you know, as I grew to be more intimate with the community and understand the community’s needs, I addressed them more directly through like literacy tutorials and mentorship programs drying and people from greater Kingston community, my most memorable experience! Okay, sorry. Again, in the crux of election season, you know, things were getting really violent and really hard and street theatre was becoming ever more difficult to perform, so once we actually decided the Hannastown woman would perform within her own ghetto because no other ghettos were accepting us within their boundaries. And it was a piece about how women would convince men to drop guns. I’m sorry, I’m like getting choked up. And in the middle of the performance actually a raid by the Jamaican Defense Force kind of came in and took it over and shot up the place, which was crazy, but after that was over the woman kept performing, and they were screaming and crying and really emotionally effected by it, and it was arguably the most powerful performance we had ever engaged in, and it was really well received and I can’t believe I’m crying. It was a really emotional moment but like a wonderful moment and one that I will take with me forever and yeah, anyway, so yeah, no. I’m still very much in touch with my collective. It was a phenomenal experience and that’s the end.