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Fulbright Program: U.S. Applicant Podcast

Transcript For: Fulbright Alumni Roundtable Introduction - Asia

Jonathan Akeley, Fulbright Manager for Asia, hosts a Fulbright Alumni Roundtable in New York. Alumni Justin Hakuta, Becky Thilo, Jeffrey Hornung, Christopher MacDonald and Aaron Pratts related their experiences during their Fulbright grant.

Jonathan:          Welcome, everyone.  This is the Fulbright Alumni Roundtable for the Asia-Pacific region, which I’m sure you all know about already.  My name is Jonathan Akeley and I am the Program Manager for the Asia-Pacific region.  So I’m just going to give a brief overview to let you know how things are going to go tonight and then we’ll jump into the session.  This is not a guidance session, so we don’t actually go through step by step this is how you fill this out on the application.  Those sessions are listed in the program booklets that hopefully you guys all picked up at your various regional offices.  So if you want to go to those, you’re always welcome to come to one of those.  So this one we’re going to be focusing much more, you know, intensively on experiences that Fulbrighters actually have while they’re on their grants, and we have five alumni with us tonight, and after I do my initial comments they will go through and introduce themselves and let you guys know what they did during their Fulbright grants where they were and how they went about it, things like that.  And then after we’ve gone through, and all of the Fulbright alumni have had a chance to introduce themselves, we’ll open it up to questions, and we’ll go region by region, and you guys can ask either the alumni or me whatever questions you have.  So, just to start out, just to straighten things out, because when we talk about the Fulbright Program it’s a very complex program and we know people get confused with all the acronyms and terminology that we use, so (inaudible) explain things right up front.  All of you are now in IIE offices.  IIE is the Institute Of International Education.  We are not the Fulbright Foundation or the Fulbright Company, or anything like that.  People get confused because there are a lot of different organizations that work with the Fulbright Program.  The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is funded by the U.S. Department of State, and we also work with what we call Fulbright Commissions overseas.  The Fulbright Commissions are bi-nationally funded, non-governmental organizations that actually administer the awards in the fifty countries where there are Fulbright Commissions.  In countries where there is no Fulbright Commission the Fulbright programs are administered by the U.S. Embassies in those countries.  I think all of our Fulbrighters tonight actually come from places where there are Fulbright Commissions, but if you have questions about that we can always discuss that, because that pertains to how the grant actually runs when you’re in the host country.  So, just to give a little background on Fulbright, Senator Fulbright was a Rhode Scholar, so we think that probably had a lot to do with getting him really interested in international education.  The Fulbright Program was established in 1946, right in the aftermath of World War II.  It was initially set up under the kind of guiding philosophy of Fulbright that the best way to avoid future conflicts was to have people who really could understand and communicate with each other, and the only real way to bring that about is to have people live and study with each other.  And the initial funding for the Fulbright Program actually is a very ingenious way, because they, you know, since a lot of the world economies were in ruin at the time it wasn’t exactly a great time to get money for these new educational exchanges; that wasn’t exactly the thing that people were most concerned about.  So they actually used the funds from the sale of surplus war materials, because the U.S. Military had more, you know, more material in probably every continent on the planet in all kinds of places.  So they turned that funding into the initial money that was used to fund the exchanges.  Interestingly enough, although a lot of people don’t know this, the very first Fulbright Programs were in China, the Philippines, and Burma, so they were all in Asia, which most people don’t realize.  Another thing that’s really quite unique about the Fulbright program is it’s not an academic fellowship per say, which makes it very different from a lot of other fellowships and confuses a lot of people. The primary focus of it is to enhance the mutual understanding and cultural exchange between the United States and other countries in the world, and that’s something that as people develop their project proposals that’s really important to keep in mind.  There’s, you know, there’s an idea that the next generation of leaders needs to have a wider world view and needs to stick it out there and have exposure to the world, and initially, another thing, I don’t know how many of you have heard of Fulbright from your professors or faculty members, a lot of faculty members today associate Fulbright with something that’s only available to them, to people at their level, but obviously that’s not true or you wouldn’t be here right now, but it’s also the case that the Fulbright Fellowships were originally intended for people just getting out of undergraduate, because the idea was that the best way to kind of enhance people’s world view was to get them kind of right when they’re at kind of apex of their intellectual kind of curiosity and learning and, you know, just coming out, and haven’t yet started their careers.  As time went on it developed and other parts of the Fulbright Program were at it.  But the very first part was for graduating seniors just coming out of undergrad.  Today, in the U.S. Student Program, people at the graduating senior, master, PhD level, are all eligible to apply.  And another pretty unique thing about the Fulbright Program is that applicants can apply in all fields of study; it’s open to all of the arts fields, as well as academic and business and anything else.  What does the Fulbright grant cover?  This is always the key question.  We don’t, I’m not going to give you any dollar amounts for how much the Fulbright grants are worth because it’s different in each country.  It’s set based on the living conditions in that country.  But all basic Fulbright grants will cover round-trip air transportation and a monthly living stipend to cover room, board, and incidental costs.  So, we have evolved since the beginning of the program.  A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of meeting one of the first Fulbrighters to Australia who was telling us stories about how he spent about three or four weeks on a freighter to Australia back in 1949.  We have enhanced the grant since then and we do fly you now.  We’re very happy about that.  One thing to keep in mind as we go through and the alumnis kind of share their experiences, is that we have Fulbright grants in over a hundred and forty countries, and in a lot of ways each Fulbright Program is like its own little program.  So what’s true for Japan is not going to necessarily be true for Malaysia, and so don’t panic if you hear things that sound very different from what you’ve been reading because each country has its own kind of particulars.  In addition, there are two kind of main categories of Fulbright grants.  There’s the traditional Fulbright full grant where the individual proposes a research and study project for the country.  And then there’s the English Teaching Assistantship Award where rather than designing your own individual course of study you’re placed in a classroom either at the secondary school level, college level, and your primary job is teaching conversational English to students in the host country.  And that actually, in recent years, the English Teaching Assistantship portion of the Fulbright Program has been the fastest growing part of the program around the world.  Last year we received about sixty seven hundred applications for Fulbright awards around the world, and out of those about thirteen hundred were for the East Asia region and about two hundred fifteen were for South Asia.  Each year we anticipate awarding approximately fifteen hundred Fulbright grants around the world.  Just one final thing before we start with the alumni is probably obvious from what I’ve been saying.  The Fulbright Award is not a study abroad program.  That’s not a proper term, because kind of the crux of the Fulbright application is your project proposal.  You are telling us the who, what, when, where, why, and how, what’s going to happen.  We’re not going to tell you where to go, what to study, what classes to take.  That’s what you tell us.  So it’s very different from a study abroad experience.  Just a note on how you’re reviewed.  Each of the committees that we have about, these days, we have about a hundred screening committees review all of the Fulbright applications.  If you apply in one of the academic fields your application is screened by a regional expert, so if you apply to China it’ll be screened by a sinologist.  If you apply in one of the artistic fields it’ll actually be reviewed by specialists in that field; if you apply in painting you’ll be reviewed by painters, if you apply in music you’ll be reviewed by musicians.  So that’s how it works.  And that is the initial screening process that IIE runs in the United States.  For people that make it past that initial screening round and are recommended for final review, the final decisions on grants are actually made in the host country.  So either the Fulbright Commission or the Embassy in the host country will make the final decisions as to the principle alternate non-select candidates.  And, with that, I think I’m going to turn it over.  We’re going to start in New York with Justin Hakuta, who went to the Philippines.

Justin:               Thank you, Jon.  Yeah, so my name is Justin Hakuta.  I spent ten months last year researching human trafficking in the Philippines.  My projective, my project goal was to explore what mainly grass roots, non-governmental organizations were doing to address the issue of modern day slavery.  So in the Philippines that ended up being mostly forced prostitution and domestic slavery, as well as forced labor.  What I did was I spent the bulk of my time interviewing a bunch of different stake holders involved in the issue.  So whether that was social workers or activists or politicians or policemen, and then also trafficking survivors and prostitutes and pimps.  But, so a lot of what I did was interviewing, and then also program observation of the NGO’s themselves.  As far as language for the Philippines, it actually wasn’t a problem because their second official language is English.  Their first language is Pilipino, or Tagalog, so I would speak a combination of that, but as far as the Philippines was concerned, you could get by pretty well on English most of the time.  As far as me reaching out to my affiliated organizations, it was really a matter of just kind of like e-mailing people, calling people, and getting in touch, not really having any direct connection to them, and for me, just kind of being persistent paid off, and I was able to get a fairly wide range of letters of support.  My affiliated organization was a migrant research NGO, and my level of interaction with them was mainly just support, so if I needed feedback on something, or if I needed some contacts or resources I would meet with them, maybe every other week or so.  So I spent most of my time doing research, and then on the side I also got into filming a documentary about a survivor of sex trafficking, and also recording an album, a hip hop album, because I rap, about human trafficking.  So my goal ended up being combining my research, you know, as my professional skill set, but also my personal interests in music and film to raise awareness of that issue.  So for me it was, I mean, it was an incredibly powerful ten months, and it, I mean, really, the things that made it for me were the accessibility that I had to the organizations I was working for, working with, I was actually pretty fortunate in the sense that the NGO’s that I worked with were really open to sharing information, and there wasn’t kind of this, I wasn’t held at shoulder length to them most of the time.  So that was really good.  Even though I was researching a sensitive issue, I kind of made sure that A, I mean, I didn’t put myself in really dangerous positions, and B, I mean, there was just kind of a certain protocol and closer way of going about things that I learned early on to adhere to, and that made it way more easier to kind of communicate with people and get things done.  So, that was my project.

Jonathan:        Great.  So we’re going to go out to other regions now.  We’re going to start

                        with Washington DC.  Jeffrey I think is going to be our first person, and        

                        he did his Fulbright grant in Japan, and then we’ll go to Aaron after

                        Jeffrey’s done. 

Jeffrey:             Hello? 

Jonathan:          Hello?

Jeffrey:             My name is Jeffrey.  I was in Japan from September 2005 to December 2006, and I was on the research grant conducting research in the field of political science for my doctoral research.  I was specifically researching, or using the Fulbright to research foreign policy decision making in Japan.  So that involved a lot of going to Parliament, going to the Ministries, and getting a lot of primary materials as well as interviews with bureaucrats and politicians.  I was affiliated, when I was in Japan I was affiliated with the University of Tokyo, and how I went about getting the affiliation with the University of Tokyo was first starting here with my dissertation chair, asking him for contacts at the university.  And then he put me in contact with a professor there who agreed that she liked my project and she would host me while I was at the university.  But this brings me to, I guess one of the challenges or unexpected obstacles that I encountered when I was on Fulbright.  During this, before I went she was granted an Abe Fellowship to come to the U.S. to do research for herself.  So this meant that she could no longer be my advisor.  So she put me to another professor who was not exactly interested in my research and really wasn’t in the same field as my research, and so it posed a lot of problems while I was there initially trying to set up and start.  But I did contact the Fulbright Commission there in Tokyo and worked with other professors from other universities and really found ways to overcome it.  So in the end the project, my project was successful, and I was able to meet, interview, ninety six politicians and bureaucrats and really get a lot more of information than I thought was possible.  So, I guess to just finish here with my little brief statement, one of the, to balance, I guess, since I brought up a challenge, to balance a more memorable experience, while I was there I tried many times to meet the prime minister at that time, his name was Junichiro Koizumi, and I kept sending him letters to try to meet him, and finally, it was just a cold letter, using the Fulbright connection, he agreed that I could come to the Prime Minister’s office.  He wasn’t able to meet me, but he was, I was in the office next to his office, and he let me talk to his secretary, and find out a little bit about how policy making works in Japan.  But it’s, for me it’s a really good memory just because it was a cold letter sent purely using the Fulbright, the name of the Fulbright, and in the end it really was a good thing for me.  So that is where I will stop, and turn it over to whoever’s next.

Aaron:              Okay.  My name is Aaron Pratts, and I’m here also in the Washington DC IIE office.  My Fulbright year was 2005-2006 in Malaysia on the Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship grant, ETA grant, in Malaysia.  The thing about the ETA grant is that unlike, I think, the research grants, is that they put the ETA grantees, the English Teaching Assistants, further out from the capital, in more rural areas of the country of the country that you select.  In Malaysia it was a small (inaudible).  It was the province, the state of Terengganu, Malaysia, and then a small district called Basut in Terengganu, Malaysia, where the American Language Commission of International Exchange decided to place me for the term of the English Teaching Assistantship grant there.  I spent the year, the term, as a ETA on the school’s campus in Basut.  And the interesting thing about the ETA grant was that it was more than just teaching English as a foreign language, but also helping the local teachers in the secondary school with all subjects in English in Malaysia.  So it was the English classes, the math classes, the science classes, then also some of my past experience in music as well; I was helping the band, the marching band, at the Malaysian secondary school there, so I was helping all of the teachers with, with all of the students and teaching these courses, and English; helping them with writing lesson plans, and helping them with the students’ homework, and different things like that.  So that’s kind of, it’s kind of a brief description of what kind of went on for, during things, during the day.  I also want to highlight as well, there’s a question that was brought up about how I engaged myself in the local community.  Because it was a small district in the rural, in a small rural district in a small, also rural, state, in Malaysia, and I had the opportunity to go out in a local community, out in a local town, and actually engage the local population as well; local business owners, that I got to befriend, and also the local town just adjacent to where the school was, and I was able to spend time after helping the teachers during school hours.  So then after school hours I would take time and go out into the town and make friends with the local Malaysian community.  It was something that was really interesting for me for the year, as an English Teaching Assistant in Malaysia.  And I just want to also relate this to my education and career goals as well, another point that I would like to talk about.  I actually did the Fulbright ETA grant after my Bachelor’s, my undergraduate Bachelor’s degree, kind of in between doing my Master’s degree, because I do plan to go back for a Master’s degree in the field of international education, or international cultural communications, so I though my experience in Malaysia would actually prepare me for either field, either field of study because it was kind of like the intercultural communication type research that I really did, I was kind of doing intercultural research without kind of knowing I was doing intercultural research by engaging myself in the local community, and speaking with all of the local Malaysians in Malaysia and anything like that.  And also, the reason for international education, because I also still work in the field of international education exchange as my selected career of choice with the international student exchange here in Washington DC.  So I think this Fulbright grant has helped me to continue to think about my future education goals and to continue in the career and I think I’ll stop there as well. 

Jonathan:          All right.  Thank you, Jeffrey.  Now, Becky, who was an ETA in Thailand?

Becky:              Yes.  Hi, I’m Becky Thilo, and I was an English Teaching Assistant in Thailand.  I was in a small town outside of Bangkok during my time there called (Nicontesee )  and it’s actually in the province of (Nakhon vaton,), which might be a little more familiar to those of you who know Thailand.  I was one of ten ETA’s who were kind of scattered around the country.  I was the closest one to Bangkok and, as previously mentioned, everyone was quite a ways outside of Bangkok.  Some were literally living in rice fields.  I did have a one month orientation in Bangkok, and that was with the Thailand-U.S. Educational Foundation office there.  They have a wonderful orientation for the English Teaching Assistantships, and I think they also have a smaller version for the research grantees.  I kind of represent also an alternate, so if people have questions about that I could provide some insight into what happens if you’re an alternate.  I found out last minute.  I actually left medical school to accept my Fulbright and had to rush through getting my Visa and my medical clearance and I called Jonathan several times and was like, “I dropped out of med school!  Are you sure this is going to happen?”  So, it did, and I went, and I am back now, so hopefully this represents another facet of the Fulbright experience, and though exciting, it’s certainly, it wasn’t a bad experience at all.  It was a fabulous experience.  And just talking about my preparation, given my limited amount of time, I didn’t really know any Thai when I went, and that was all right because there was a wonderful orientation and there were tons of opportunities to learn and practice Thai.  I had heard a little bit about the program from my predecessor.  I was put in touch with the girl who had taught at the school where I ended up teaching.  She gave me some advice, but really my experience was vastly different from her experience, and I think that’s something that is true for any Fulbrighter because it’s such an individual experience.  Even for the ten different ETA’s in Thailand, I think we all took back much different, our experiences were very different.  Though we did have a lot in common when we talked about how unusual the Thai education system was from our own experiences in the U.S.  My educational goals and career goals: I was an English and religious studies major at Rice University, and I used my English major I suppose as a, as I taught.  And for religion I was interested in going to Asia and learning more about Buddhism, having been one of the religions that I didn’t focus on in my undergraduate experience.  And then finally, it kind of also ties into medical school because eventually I’d like to go into an international health track and hopefully return to Thailand, but that’s where kind of my place was in relation with Fulbright going into it.  And I guess finally I’ll mention a little bit about my experiences in Thailand and engaging the community.  I taught at this school Monday through Friday.  I taught over five hundred different students, and it was very hard for me to keep them straight in the beginning; I thought I’d never get to know my students, and then at the end I really did know all of them, or at least their English names.  It was a very memorable experience.  Some of them still e-mail me and, I know, pretty heartwarming.  So, if people are thinking about the English Teaching Assistantship, I’d definitely encourage you to keep thinking about it.  But outside of the teaching obligations I was able to travel a little bit on the weekends.  I would bump into people on buses or something, and they would say, “Oh, can you tutor my daughter?”  And I ended up tutoring several different people independently in English that way.  One of the English teachers booked a van, a school van, and on two different weekends we went around town, and I was the centerpiece I guess, or the token (Fah-rong.  Thai for foreigner.) in all of the pictures, and we created an English brochure, a brochure in English, for the town, and that was pretty interesting.  I’m not sure what they’ll do with it, but it was a good experience nonetheless.  And I also hosted English tables at lunch, and so students could come talk to me during lunches, and on every Friday we had an English club, which involved different games and songs, and I also created different cultural material throughout my time there: posters about Valentine’s Day, and that sort of thing, that have stayed at the school.  And then finally, one of the big things that is pushed in Thailand is English camps.  And I participated in one English camp, actually not in my host school, at a private catholic school in Thailand, and we went kind of away to a beach and had lots of different activities in English, and yeah, it was really a fabulous experience for me and for the kids.  So that’s kind of an overview of my experience and if people have questions about the living environment I have some comments about that, or kind of I guess anything else.  So I’ll just wrap up there.

Jonathan:          Okay.  Thanks, Becky.  I can definitely attest to the exciting nature of the waiting of her grant.  It seems to be a kind of a trend of the Fulbright Program in the ETA program in Thailand actually.  The first, I think Becky was in the second cohort of Fulbrighters to go to, ETA Fulbrighters to go to Thailand.  With the first cohort of Fulbrighters to go to Thailand, I think three days, two days after they arrived there was a coup, so we got lots of calls from panicked parents, but it was, you know, coups in Thailand, as the Commission Director said to me, she’s like, ah, coups in Thailand.  She’s like, you know, we’ll have another one in a couple of years, you know, they give out flowers during the coups, so, but anyway, interesting and exciting definitely.  So last but not least we’re going to go to Chris in San Francisco, who was a Fulbrighter in Australia. 

Chris:               Hi.  So my name is Chris, as he said.  I was in Australia from 2005-2006 and I worked at University of Sydney in a physics lab developing new types of biomaterials.  So this is a little bit I guess divergent from the general path of a lot of the students, but there is a lot of science, both in Australia and throughout Asia, so if that’s the path you were thinking of applying through, it’s definitely available.  And depending on your country, can be encouraged.  The reason I applied to work in biomaterials is because my undergraduate education had a lot of physics and hard science and electrical engineering.  But I wanted to do a change in path.  I wanted to work in something in a biological field.  So I worked out a project in Australia where I could apply what I knew to also learn something else in the bio field.  And that’s allowed me to become confident in a new field and then continue my education, and now I’m studying a PhD in bioengineering at UC San Diego.  Without the Fulbright, it would not have allowed me to do that.  Another thing that it allowed me to do is continue in international collaboration.  I worked in a lab in Sydney and I’ve kept up contact with them, and actually the NSF has funded me a grant to go back to Australia, which of course, among other things, is a great thing to do.  However, it’s given me a chance to link what I’m doing now with what I did then and continue this international collaboration, and to really support the mission of the Fulbright through science, which may not be a conventional way to do it, however it’s worked out very well.  While I was there I had an opportunity to work with many people in government labs and a lot of scientists and interact with a lot of people while I was there.  So it was a fantastic opportunity.  On the other hand, of course, you also get to be in Sydney, which is just a great city and a great place to live, so, you know, realize that it’s not just your project, it’s also a different country.  They may not speak a different language, so you may not have a language proficiency requirement, but sometimes I wonder if they should have had a proficiency requirement, because sometimes when I got there I really had trouble figuring out what people were saying.  Probably one or two weeks into my experience in Australia someone told me that ‘to meet up with him’ in the arvo, and so, you know, I spent an hour looking online to figure out where that was in the university, only to find out that’s short for ‘afternoon’.  And so he was actually in the same building.  And so sometimes, you know, even in Australia, which can be kind of tricky, because you think its going to be simple; oh, they speak English, you know, same type of culture.  It can be surprisingly different, even in a big city in an English speaking country.  And I guess the differences are smaller there, but still, you know, it is a little bit different, and you do get there, and you do realize it is a different culture, and it was a really eye opening experience while I was there.  One of my biggest challenges I guess was probably coming home from Australia, not just in the difficulty of getting here, it was just, I really didn’t want to go because it was really just a great experience, and fortunately I can continue my collaboration with them, which through the Fulbright grant has allowed me to continue it, and now I can go back there and hopefully spend some more time there and stay for a while longer.  So I guess one of the big takeaway messages is: Fulbright isn’t just a year abroad.  You don’t go there, you know, do your project, and come back.  You actually can have far reaching ramifications of it.  You can continue this relationship.  Go to your grad school.  Make it part of your degree, come back, continue working on it.  You can really benefit this other country and the mutual understanding, as well as your own career.  And it can continue throughout your career afterwards.  That’s it. 

Jonathan:          Great.  Thank you.  Yeah, I think following up on what Chris was saying, you know, it’s kind of, I think we have an expression the State Department made up, you know, Fulbrighters for life, and so that’s kind of what we try to encourage, the mentality we try to encourage.  So I think we’re going to take just a minute’s pause here as our…