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Fulbright Program: U.S. Applicant Podcast

Transcript For: Episode 2, Part 2

Valerie Hymas, Program Manager for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia and Tony Claudino, Director, Fulbright Student Outreach, discuss host country affiliation.

Valerie:             Well, welcome back to the Fulbright podcast.  I’m your host, Valerie Hymas, senior program manager for the Fulbright program responsible for world areas Europe, Eurasia, Central Asia.

Tony:                And Tony Claudino. director of outreach.

Valerie:             And now we’re going to be talking about establishing a host affiliation, which, as I’ve said before, is one of the most challenging things a candidate must deal with when preparing an application.  The first question is: What is a host affiliation?  What do these people mean by host affiliation?  Well, as, if you listened to the podcast with our esteemed colleague, Theresa Granza, this is a country-driven program, so what a host affiliation entails really does depend upon the country that you’re going to and can mean many, many different things.  In general, a host affiliation is the institution or the individual in your host country which will help you supervise the project, as well as help you gain full access to all resources necessary to facilitate the project.  Some countries require that your host affiliation be with a university, an academic institution or other formal institution in that country, and that is often necessary because of the visa process or visa regulations for that country.  Other countries have no requirements at all and they’ll allow you to make whatever arrangements are necessary.  You may establish affiliation with a university or you could work with an NGO or a government organization or even with an individual who has expertise in your field that can help you facilitate the project.  So it really is dependent upon the host country, and you should read the country summary in detail to find out, you know, what regulations there are so that you don’t apply to a country that requires you to have a university affiliation and then propose a more independent research project where that would then ultimately be problematic.

Tony:                The question I have, Valerie, is what exactly does an applicant ask for in an affiliation?  Is he asking for salary, is he asking… you know a lot of people ask: what do they want in the letter?

Valerie:             Well, first we should say that we do recommend candidates to obtain letters from their host institution or person on institutional letterhead and include those with their Fulbright applications.

Tony:                So email, fax…

Valerie:             No emails, no faxes will be accepted.  They must be on letterhead and presented to us in hardcopy with the hardcopy application.  Really the letter should address the nature of the relationship that the candidate has established with that host institution.  If they’re, for instance, going to be enrolling on a degree program, and perhaps they haven’t yet been accepted, it’s not possible for them to get an acceptance letter by our deadline.  Instead they may want to speak to the department head or faculty member who thinks that they’re a good fit with the program, who maybe, you know, has an interest in their project, who writes that they, ultimately if they receive acceptance, would be willing to work with them.  If the student is going to be working with a particular supervisor, or faculty member, but not on a degree program, perhaps they’ve arranged for office space, or access to library or archival resources that are closed, that the student needs special permission to receive.  If they’ve prearranged that, then the letter should address that.  It’s up to the candidate to establish the relationship with the host and for that letter to address any details or formalities that are crucial to the completion of their project.

Tony:                Could they have more than one affiliation?  I mean, that’s a question that’s always asked.

Valerie:             Certainly.

Tony:                So they could set up an affiliation with a university, and then also with an NGO or community group?

Valerie:             They absolutely can do that if that’s relevant to their project.  They shouldn’t spread themselves too thin.  If they feel like, you know, I might work with this person, or I might work with that, they should, you know, try to keep their project as focused as possible.  For the purposes of Fulbright administration, sometimes we consider only one of those as the formal affiliation, but, you know, they may use resources with other organizations as well, and so those letters would also be important to include in your application.

Tony:                What about American organizations in these host countries?  That’s always, I always get that question.

Valerie:             Unfortunately, because this is a cultural exchange program, we really do prefer candidates to establish host institutional affiliations with domestic institutions.  So American institutions are frowned upon, as are other international organizations such as UNESCO or other UN programs that are internationally focused.  You really should try to work with domestic institutions.  That does vary from country to country, for instance, we allow Fulbrighters to Egypt to affiliate with…

Tony:                …the American University of Cairo.

Valerie:             The American University of Cairo!  Thank you!  I’m thinking of Greece, which is the American School of Classical Studies, which is another exception to this rule that is allowed.  And so there are some exceptions, but, in general, a domestic institution is favorable.

Tony:                Or non-profits, or NGOs, or…

Valerie:             Any domestic type institution is preferred.

Tony:                I’m going to talk about identifying potential host affiliations.  There’re a couple of tips that I usually give to candidates when they’re finding an affiliation.  First one is to use the resources you have on campus.  I would first hit international students on campus.  Even though someone, perhaps, let’s say you want to apply to Germany, and you know that there’s a German student on your campus, but he or she is in a different field of study.  You can still get a hold of the international student and talk to him or her about your project, and hopefully they can guide you in the right direction in terms of what websites to look at or what organizations to contact.

                        The second thing, I think, is your faculty, obviously, on campus.  So I think first you have your American professors, a lot of them have been overseas, and done research.  Many of them have been Fulbrighters as well, so you want to look at that and I’ll get more information on that in a second.  But you want American faculty, and you want to talk about visiting faculty.  So if you know there’s a visiting faculty member from Germany on campus, definitely go to the session where he or she is speaking and see if you can talk to them and say, hey I’m applying for a Fulbright, would you happen to know any organizations I can affiliate?  Of course, I should not have used Germany in this example, because you can’t really do an affiliation with Germany, right?

Valerie:             Germany has specific requirements or expectations for affiliation, and it is kind of an exception to a rule whereas Germany will actually place Fulbrighters at universities in Germany.  Fulbrighters, candidates to Germany, should and can suggest preferences for host affiliation at specific German universities and, yes, all Fulbrighters to Germany must be affiliated with academic institutions.  But the Fulbright Commission in Germany does reserve the right to place them where they feel it is most appropriate.  So it doesn’t mean that you can’t get a letter of affiliation from a particular faculty member at a particular German university, because that will increase your chances of being placed at that institution in Germany.  But if you are unable to obtain a letter for Germany, you shouldn’t worry about it so much.  As long as you have a feasible project, the German commission will actually place their Fulbrighters.  The Fulbright Commission in Austria works similarly to that, so these are two countries where they actually place Fulbrighters, rather than the candidate has to go and find her own placement.

Tony:                Any other countries you want to highlight, or you’re good?

Valerie:             I do want to say, because I’ve had a recent issue come up with Russia, and this is my world region so I know this, and I’m sure when we interview our other colleagues with other world regions they’ll talk about the specifics as well.  But, for instance, it’s an actual absolute requirement for candidates to Russia to affiliate with academic institutions because otherwise it is impossible to obtain a visa for an academic year to that country.  So independent research projects with supervisors not affiliated with academic institutions are impossible.  So keep that in mind if you’re applying to Russia.  There are very stringent regulations in that country.

Tony:                OK, I’ll continue with my tips now, thank you, Valerie.  The second tip is actually you should look at the Fulbright Scholar Program’s website which is www.cies.org.  On that you’ll be able to see the directories of U.S. faculty that have been abroad on a Fulbright and also visiting faculty that are here in the United States doing research or teaching at a specific university.  So we encourage you to get in touch with them.

                        The last thing we’d encourage is use search engines.  We’ve had many examples where people have typed in their project statement on a search engine and managed to find a professor that was interested and then contacted the professor.  This is a true story actually.

Valerie:             Wow.  Very exciting.

Tony:                And then also, look in your research, for example, in the bibliography that you put together, your research, you’ll find professors that are publishing. And so those are some of my ideas.

Valerie:             I have one idea, one final idea as well, which I sometimes give to people.  I don’t know what the success rate on this is, but sometimes foreign embassies here in the U.S., you know the Armenian embassy or the Egyptian embassy, often have educational resources at their embassy or even at their consulates, and sometimes if you contact them, they have lists of institutions and schools that specialize in certain fields and that is another way of approaching this.  I know, for instance, the United Kingdom has the British Council which, you know, has an unlimited resource on academic institutions in the United Kingdom.  So contacting foreign embassies is a way to go as well.

Tony:                Great.  And I think we’ve exhausted establishing a host affiliation.That’s it for this week of the Fulbright U.S. Student Fulbright podcast.  Next week we’ll be talking about the Critical Language Enhancement Awards.