ABOUT FULBRIGHT

Fulbright Program: U.S. Applicant Podcast

Transcript For: Fulbright Alumni Roundtable - Europe. Introduction

Fulbright Alumni Roundtable - Europe. John Adler introduces Alumni James Allwein, Stephanie Trudeau, Victor Florient, Nathan Bordegaray, and Rebecca Ratliff who discuss their Fulbright experience.

Jonathan:          Hey, everyone.  My name’s Jon Adler.  I’m the program manager for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia in the U.S. Student Program and I’m joined here by four Fulbright alumni who I’ll introduce.  This on my right is Stephanie Trudeau.  She did a Fulbright grant in Italy in 2005-2006.  Her field of study was Western European Studies.  On my left here I have Nathan Bordegaray.  He was a English Teaching Assistantship in Spain in 2006-2007.  On his left is James Allwein.  He was a Fulbright Grantee in Greece in the field of study of business and economics in 2004-2005.  On his left is Victor Fliorent.  His Fulbright country was Ukraine in the field of study of economic development in 2006-2007.  We also have another alumni who hopefully will be with us soon.  She’s been based in D.C. but we’re waiting to hook up with D.C., so we’ll introduce her later.  For right now I’m just going to give a brief overview of the Fulbright Program and for the U.S. Student Program.  As far as the Fulbright Program’s concerned, it’s the U.S. government’s flagship educational and cultural exchange program.  It was established in 1946 following World War II to foster mutual understanding between the people of the U.S. and other countries.  Many Fulbright programs are sponsored by the U.S. State Department in cooperation with Fulbright Commissions and foundations and U.S. Embassies abroad.  IIE administers the programs in the U.S.  While the focus of the Fulbright Program is cultural exchange, the means for facilitating exchange is through academic, educational, community based activities.  That is, the applicant proposes a research study project for most grant programs.  And finally, an important feature of the Fulbright Program is to provide opportunities for grantees to experience a country or culture for which they have little or no experience.  As far as the U.S. Student Program’s concerned, there’s also a Foreign Fulbright Student Program that’s for non-U.S. citizens to come over to the U.S. and study.  The U.S. Student Program is for U.S. students to go overseas and study, and it’s offered everywhere in the world.  Of course this roundtable’s for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia.  The U.S. Student Program’s open to recent college and university graduates, graduate students, creative, visual, and performing artists, young professionals in fields such as law, public health, business, and education.  Another point is you don’t have to be enrolled in a graduate program to be eligible for a Fulbright grant.  The grant provides support for one year of self designed study or research, which could include activities as university coursework, library or field research, classes in a music or arts school, research or work with NGOs or local government agencies, or a combination of these or other projects.  The student program also offers English Language Teaching Assistantships.  We call them ETAs here.  These are offered in over thirty countries, a lot of which are in Europe.  In this program, grantees are placed in schools, universities, or bi-national cultural centers where they will assist in language learning classes.  As far as the overall program’s concerned, we receive upwards of seven thousand applications every year for about fifteen hundred grants in all fields and disciplines.  This is to live and study in one of a hundred and forty countries world wide.  Just more points on the U.S. Student Program, it’s not just another study abroad program.  Grantees are provided opportunities to meet, work, and live with people of the host country, sharing daily experiences over an extended period of time.  Our grantees are expected to engage full time in the activities of the project that they propose.  Also, they’re expected to interact in a variety of different ways with the host community by following your own interests, whether it’s in service to nonprofit organizations, through sports or arts activities, or in visits to schools, community organizations or agencies that talk about the United States, your work, or particular hobbies or talents that you’d like to continue overseas.  Now I’m just going to do a short overview of the grants offered in Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia.  For the U.S. Student Program in Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia, there’re grants offered to every country in the region with the exception of Serbia, Monte Negro, Kosovo, Lichtenstein, and Monaco.  Everywhere else we do have grants available.  For Malta there’re not specific grants available, but we do have E.U. grants (that’s one of the grants offered for Europe), and you could propose studying in Malta on one of those.  The Europe region offers a diverse array of special grant opportunities, which you can learn about either in the Fulbright student guidebook for 2009-10, or also on our webpage which is us.fulbrightonline.org.  Language requirements, those vary entirely by country, so it’s hard to make generalizations about that.  Within Europe the UK is by far the most competitive country offered.  We get about five hundred applications for roughly twelve grants every year.  So it’s extremely difficult to be awarded a grant for there.  In addition to the UK, full grant programs in the European Union: France, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain, are also extremely difficult.  You’d have to be an outstanding candidate to really stand a chance in those countries.  As far as English Teaching Assistantships, the most difficult tend to be Andorra, Belgium, Spain, and Italy.  In terms of numbers of grants available, Germany by far offers the most.  They offer eighty full grant opportunities and a hundred and forty English Teaching Assistantships.  That’s by far the biggest.  A lot of countries also offer one or two grants, but that’s a bunch in the region.  As far as European countries that routinely receive fewer applications, in the full grant category we tend to struggle getting strong applications from Austria, Finland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania.  For English Teaching Assistantships Turkey, the Slovak Republic, and Bulgaria, we also tend to always push for more applications.  I can personally recommend all of them.  If you have an interest in a country outside of the UK or Spain or Italy or France, we certainly encourage applications from those countries.  As far as selections for countries in the regional programs, if you look in our materials you’ll see that there’re Eurasia grants and there’re also Central Asia grants.  Those are based on the quality of applications.  There’s not generally a set quota, so we don’t list a number in the booklets or on our webpage on how many grants are offered in that area, but that’s generally how that works.  I think I’ve spoken enough.  I think we could let the alumni speak about their Fulbright experiences.  I think we’ll start with Stephanie if that’s okay? 

Stephanie:         Hi.  I went to Italy 2005-2006.  Actually, I went for nine months and I actually got there January 2006.  My project was studying Three Saints Feast; the folk art, the music, the traditions, the culture, and comparing it to the way it’s celebrated in three Ital-American communities.  So it was sight specific.  I had already done my U.S. research, and then I went to Italy and studied in the three sights in Italy.  I was looking at how traditions are carried on through the family, how they change, evolve, and comparing the differences, as I said, between the two countries.  Talking about challenges, how it related to my educational or career goals.  I was really focused on music because I’m a singer and performer and I was teaching music at the time in elementary schools.  And then I ended up getting much more involved in the folk art, the plastic art, involved.  One thing I would always say is be flexible.  You start out designing your project, having your goals, what you really believe you want to be looking at, and doing your research, and don’t be nervous about it changing because it probably will change.  Just go with the flow because you are there for your period of time to really soak up this incredible experience to give back a cultural exchange, and you can’t do that unless you are really flexible and open to whatever’s going to come your way.  Affiliation’s kind of an interesting thing.  I found mine through the internet, and I found it by going from one person to another.  I had started out with a suggestion with somebody involved in food, because one of the elements of my feast was food.  So I started with a professor in the University of Bologna who then suggested I speak to somebody else, and somebody else, and I finally ended up with somebody in Calabria.  So I kind of traveled all over Italy on the internet, and then found my person who mentored me and supported my work.  My work was independent.  I wasn’t affiliated with any particular university, so I really went there on my own.  I think one of the things that I came back with is how truly resourceful one is.  To do this, rely on yourself, because you will be amazed how good you are at making your connections and doing what you need to do.  I would also say whatever you choose to do as your project, it should be something you’re really passionate about.  So when you’re thinking about your country you can’t really think about, well, this’ll be an easier country than that one.  You have to go with your passion.  And that will be the best project you could possibly write.  If you’re not passionate, your project description probably won’t be so passionate either.  I think that’s about it.

Jonathan:          I should have added before, if anyone has questions I think we’ll take that after all the alumni speak.

Nathan:            Hi.  My name is Nathan Bordegaray.  I was an English Teaching Assistant in Spain 2006-2007.  My project was planning and executing a Model United Nations Program in a bilingual middle school in English.  As I’ll get to it, that was not initially my project.  My project changed, and that had to do with the fact that the community of Madrid, the regional government, had reached an agreement with an NGO based in New York called Global Classrooms who organizes Model United Nations tournaments throughout the world and a Model United Nations curriculum.  They had agreed to start doing a Model United Nations Program in every bilingual school in Madrid.  We were the first year, and it was on the shoulders of the English Teaching Assistants to establish the program from scratch.  So it was a pretty daunting challenge.  For a little context, I did Model United Nations in high school and I did it in college, and would never have even dreamed of proposing it as a project because I would have thought it would have been unrealistic.  Similarly, I lived in Madrid but the school I worked with was in the suburbs in Madrid in a traditionally disadvantaged neighborhood.  But nevertheless they had bilingual programs, so this was kind of interesting.  It was a real change because my background at the time was doing a PhD in Spanish Literature, and I had taught Spanish at the university level.  So I went from teaching Spanish at the university level to teaching English at the middle school level in a rough neighborhood.  When you teach college you almost never deal with insubordination.  You could start class on time, but all of a sudden I found that it would take ten minutes to get everybody to sit down and to be quiet and to stop throwing paper and to stop hitting each other.  That’s something I wish I would have known in advance.  So that’s some of the differences between the Spanish  educational system and the American educational system.  There’s just some vast differences.  The Model United Nations Program was a success, despite all the challenges.  We basically had to start teaching the basic skills that they didn’t have.  We had to teach them how to write a paragraph.  I was surprised that in eighth grade they had no training of formal writing.  We had to teach them how to do research, we had to teach them parliamentary procedure, we did mock debates, we taught them what plagiarism is and what interpretive research is because they had no idea that to copy and paste from Wikipedia wasn’t acceptable.  The final project we ended up doing is we hosted a tournament in Madrid in the government congressional chambers.  It was really cool because four of my kids, despite the fact that they came from disadvantaged backgrounds, won best delegate awards, and they were really happy about that, and it was a real sense of achievement for me.  After that I was privileged enough to be able to go to New York with a Madrid delegation where they chose one kid from each school to compete against Americans and international students in the UN building.  So that was a really interesting experience.  My very own student won a best delegate award in a general assembly committee where he was competing against American high school seniors in some cases, native English speakers, and he did this as an eighth grader speaking English as a foreign language.  That was one of my best experiences, something I was really proud of.  I guess that’s all I can think of for now.  I’m open to any questions. 

James:              As Jon mentioned, my name’s James Allwein.  From 2004-2005 I had a grant to Greece, and I studied business and economics.  The name of the project was the Modernization of the Athens Stock Exchange.  Before I lose you about that, the basic idea was that stock exchanges were shifting from national monopolies to larger, commercial entities where anyone in any country can participate in another country’s stock exchange.  I was looking at the ramifications for that and how the Athens stock exchange can address this new environment in Europe and globally, and how that will serve to preserve their economic markets and also promote growth.  But what I thought would be more interesting to you guys and more useful to you guys in the next five minutes was to tell you how I got from your spot in 2003 when I sat there until now, how I got here, and then I’ll tell you how the Fulbright fit into my overall career as well.  So the first thing I did was my junior year I went around to one of my business professors and I asked for different topics of things going on in Europe.  The places I looked at were Finland, Sweden, Greece, Italy, and one to the EU.  Greece ended up being the most interesting to me.  I ended up making phone calls and finding people who were very supportive of my idea.  So I chose Greece, and if you look at the book, one of the first things it says is that basic to good proficiency in Greek will be helpful.  I knew very little Greek at that point because I’m not myself Greek.  So I thought now is a good time to start studying Greek so I can prepare for the application.  That is what I did and I got a language test and submitted that in the application.  The next thing it says is that candidates from all degree levels will be considered, especially business.  That was another cue to me that Greece might be a good place to go.  The project needed to be well formulated and achievable, so I made sure I had a point of why this project is important, why I’m the right person to do it, and why it needs to be done now in Greece.  After getting those ideas together, now we’re starting to get closer to, okay, this application’s really coming together.  Then I made a few phone calls to people that are in New York but that are involved in the Greek capital markets somehow.  Some of them liked my story and the referred me to other people, just like Stephanie was saying with her in Italy, and eventually the head of the stock exchange said that he would mentor me.  So I got more information from him, formulated the proposal, and ended up getting the grant.  The affiliation.  That kind of happened the same way.  I wanted to do graduate classes in economics at the same time that I was doing the research.  So the University of Athens doctoral program of Economics offered classes in English, even though they were very advanced, so that seemed like a good place to apply.  And same thing.  I made phone calls, talked to people and told them my story, and once they accepted it then letters of affiliation came in, you celebrate, you almost feel like you got the grant somehow, but really you’re just getting the application together, which as an aside I think that going through the application process and looking at how your background relates to what you want to do, why it’s important, how you go about writing the grant, is a valuable experience itself.  So if you separate even the application process from the contest, I think you’ll still end up finding it very valuable.  Also, to Stephanie’s point, picking something you’re passionate about, I thought that was a very good point because you have to work on it for a full year, and everyday you’ll be thinking about something involved with this project, and even now, four years later, I’m talking to you about it, and any time anyone asks me about Greece I’m going to be talking about it, so it should be something you really enjoy that you think is important.  As it related to my career, I came from Fairview University.  I was trying to get into a financial training program and I thought that one of the ways to really separate myself as an applicant to these training programs was to apply, and if I got something like the Fulbright that would help me stand out.  I would say something about me outside of my résumé, and people really responded to that.  I think you’d find the same thing.  Also, getting special knowledge in a particular niche area is very valuable no matter what discipline you’re in.  So if you have any other questions about that I’ll answer them later.  Thanks. 

Victor:              Hi.  My name’s Victor Fliorent and I was in Ukraine for 2006-2007.  My project was in Economic Development.  My original project was actually Agriculture Economics and I had this terrific proposal, this great idea, I’m all ready and I’m going to win a Nobel Prize, and I’ve figured it out, and that’s sort of what’s going through my head.  Then you get there and, I went to Ukraine, and I’m sort of a big proponent at getting away from traditional Europe and seeing something a little bit different.  I think you stand out more, you’ll get opportunities that I don’t think you’ll get as, let’s say, an Economist who’s 22 and out of college, or maybe a few years experience going to the UK.  In Ukraine I got to do things that I just would never have dreamed about here or in other countries.  So I’m a big proponent of that.  One of the problems of going to a less developed economy though is that things change very quickly.  So one of the things that I really had to deal with was adapting to how the country changed.  So while I originally went there for Agriculture Economics, two weeks after I got there they banned all exports of agriculture products, which sort of makes it hard to do economics when it just becomes a total political decision.  Literally, I was down in Odessa in the Black Sea and there’s just like fifteen tankers sitting out there full of grain and global crop prices at all time highs, and they’re just rotting out there.  It’s just a terrible thing to see.  I was crushed and had no idea what to do, and I basically floundered around for a while.  I’ve spoken to a lot of other people and I think research, and it was the first time I was really doing it totally on my own, with affiliations and stuff like that.  It’s just a process of ups and downs.  You’ll be going along, getting meetings, everything will be going great, and then you hit kind of a dry spell, and you got to get the ball rolling again.  So that’s just one of the things I’m sure a lot of you will encounter.  One of the things I did when I was floundering and I thought it was great, I ended up taking classes.  I’d always kind of planned to, and you meet students, some professors, and it’s just kind of a way to get your creative juices flowing again and try and come up with a different project.  I ended up meeting some other expats that were in Ukraine working for USAID.  They were doing a project on government domestic debt.  I’m an economist, figured, hey, I can do that.  It ended up being fantastic, even better than what I originally had hoped for.  I ended up meeting with the Ministry of Finance and the National Bank of Ukraine, the former head of the national bank.  It’s like meeting Alan Greenspan here or something like that.  His bodyguards are there, and he’s one of the richest guys in Ukraine, and he’s like telling me all these stories about how he really happened, like hen they were breaking up from the Soviet Union.  It was a great experience.  I think that’s what I took away from the Fulbright.  Just being able to adapt.  Don’t thing that what you’re going there to do is actually what you’ll end up doing.  Also, I’ve mentioned Ukraine and why it was such a great country as opposed to Italy.  I got tickets to a movie premier with Steven Spielberg and the president of Ukraine and stuff like that.  I just don’t think that’s some of the things you’d get in the UK or something.  I guess that’s about it as far as the actual how I got my affiliation.  Like all these guys said, call around, e-mail, professors are more than willing to help you.  You’re calling them up and saying I’m interested in what you do with your life, and I don’t think many people get those calls every day.  Obviously these aren’t like baseball players or something.  So you call them up and say I’m really interested in this very specific topic that ten people in the world probably have ever even thought about.  They’ll take your call and they’ll be glad to help you.  How did it help my career?  I’m an economist.  It’s what I’ve always wanted to be.  Unexpected surprises, I guess that was it.  I’d probably like to stress, definitely take classes.  You’ll meet other students, other people from there.  Even if you don’t think it’ll help in your project it’s just good to get out and meet people.  And that’s about it.