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Transcript For: Fulbright Alumni Roundtable, NY May 2008 - Western Hemisphere Part 2

Fulbright Alumni Roundtable, NY May 2008 - Western Hemisphere Part 2

Jody:                What we’re going to do is we’re going to move to Houston now.  As you can see what we’re trying to do is to give you kind of a range of the possibilities of Fulbright.  And Sam and Afreen have talked about their experiences in Mexico and Jamaica.  Now we’re going to move to Sylvia, who’s going to talk about her project in Peru.  So we’ve gone from Mexico to the Caribbean, and now we’ll go to South America.  Sylvia, are you ready?

Sylvia:              Yes.

Jody:                Thank you.

Sylvia:              Can you hear me?  My name is Sylvia Ciborowsky and I did my project in Peru.  Originally I went in to do a project called the role of environmental NGOs in extractive industries, projects.  It ended up being very different from that.  I guess, I chose my affiliations in the beginning kind of haphazardly, just wrote e-mails, kind of like what Sam said at the beginning, to any NGO I could find on the internet that might have anything to do with what I was interested in.  And a few of them responded, and so I affiliated myself with about four of these NGOs and ended up only working with one of them when I actually got down to Peru.  I wanted to see how effective these NGOs were in promoting better environmental standards in extractive industries.  When I got to Peru I started working with the first NGO and realized that, then this is a common experience I think with a lot of people that I’ve spoken to that have been on Fulbrights in Latin America, when you get to a small NGO, they don’t know what to do with people that want to work for free.  I had a lot of trouble just trying to get myself involved.  I got there in August and really didn’t feel that involved until about October when I went to a small town in the northern jungle area called Iquitos, not a really small town, kind of a small city, and found a organization that I just fell in love with and they invited me to go out into the jungle and work with an indigenous group effected by oil extraction on their territory.  And I ended up doing, they were working on a mapping project, so basically they were trying to map all of the resources in the indigenous territory.  The group was called the Achuar, the Achuar group.  And they wanted to map all of their resources to figure out where the oil company was stepping beyond the boundaries, or how the oil company was actually affecting them and their territory.  And so I went in to do this project with the NGO and that was not my plan at all with Fulbright; I was planning to do a research project and I was going in to do community mapping with indigenous people.  But it ended up being an amazing experience.  We were out there for about five weeks and visited I think six Achuar communities and, you know, sleeping in huts and eating toucan and other hunted animals and things like that.  So really different from what I envisioned, but I was really glad that I found this other NGO that wasn’t originally where I wanted to work, but I loved it.  So I continued to work with this NGO and instead of doing research I really ended up working on a project with them, which was territorial monitoring.  We were teaching indigenous people how to monitor their territory, look for oil spills, and how to report incidents of environmental contamination and bad company practices.  And I did this until pretty much the end of my grant period, spending some time in Lima, some time in the jungle, and at the end of my grant period I was hired on by the NGO, so I just continued to work with them for another few months, and actually starting in about a week I’m going to continue that work from United States by writing a small manual with the NGO director. So Peru, like this experience in Peru has really shaped what I do now and will probably shape what I do really for the rest of my life; I’m going to go to law school and study international environmental law and want to work with small communities affected by large oil and gas projects.  So I guess, you know, with this Fulbright, you go in expecting one thing, it doesn’t really happen, but I think that’s kind of the beauty of it, you know?  You really don’t know what to expect when you get there.  I guess if you set out a plan for yourself and really think you’re going to stick with it, you’re kind of fooling yourself because it will change.  But it was great.

Jody:                Thanks very much, Sylvia.  That was terrific.  I want to kind of make a few points here before we move on to our next speaker, because I think it is important.  At this stage of the application process you’re developing your project, and you’re developing it to the best of your ability with the resources that you have, with the contacts that you have, with the feedback that you’re getting.  But I know you’re hearing from our speakers that in many cases these expectations can change, and that’s okay.  It happens.  So don’t worry too much about making everything absolutely perfect in your project statement because it can’t necessarily be.  It depends on what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, it depends on your degree level, it depends on many things.  One of the things we talk about in the Fulbright Program and particular in the application process is every applicant is different; every project is different.  You need to focus on what it is you want to do and ways you can accomplish those goals.  Don’t get too hung up on little nitty gritty details because it can possibly change.  And I think you’re hearing a bit of that.  So now I’d like to go back to Houston, and we’re going to hear about a slightly different experience.  I don’t know if any of you are thinking of applying for an English Teaching Assistantship program, but if you are, listen carefully, because our next speaker, Natalia Czisic, is going to talk about her experience and thoughts as she applied for a teaching assistantship in Argentina three years ago?  Two years ago. 

Natalia:             Thank you.  Hi, everyone.  So I guess I’m different on the panel in a couple of distinct ways.  One is that I did the ETA program.  The other, I imagine, is that I applied as a young professional, as Jody said, so I didn’t apply through my university but I applied at large, just from Texas, and I was really concerned about that in the application process because I didn’t know if I had too much experience already and I already had a Master’s degree, and I thought that that might hurt me in the process.  Well, it ended up working out, so there’s hope for those of you that are thinking the same thing.  So I spent last year, eight months of the year, in Mar del Plata, Argentina.  It’s in the province of Buenos Aires but on the Atlantic coast.  I was placed with the national university there in the English Teaching Program, and my role was to obviously teach English and help with the classes they had.  But I feel like with this type of Fulbright, the focus on involvement in the community and engaging with the local people is really emphasized.  And while I did submit a research proposal and a project, as with other people, it turned out to be quite different.  Before I go into that I wanted kind of give you a little bit of I guess maybe an overview of the writing process that I went through when I wrote my essays.  When I was in college I applied for another international grant unsuccessfully, and so I knew that the essays were really, really important.  One key, of course, is to start early, and by being at this session I know that you guys are already doing that.  So, you know, everything of course starts with an idea.  Even though my project proposal was based on something I had done for my Master’s degree, you know, it still started out as sort of a vague thing, and you only have two pages, and in my case I had to in two pages cover both the project proposal and why I wanted to teach.  So really just like one page to describe what you’re going to do for eight months.  So I wrote the first draft and I thought it was great.  But it took a step that I think is really key, and that’s to give your essay draft to people who are experts in your field.  I met with this one guy specifically who was an expert in civil society development, which was the area I was writing about, and he basically just tore everything apart and questioned all the basic assumption I’d made, and I was really discouraged.  I was like, here I’d spent all this time writing this great essay and I thought it was wonderful and it’s not.  But that was really, really important because it made me again question, like he said, all the assumptions and, you know, I assumed things to be one way and he showed me a different perspective, and I think that made my essay stronger.  So I really encourage you to seek out people who can provide you with great feedback on your writing and, you know, that’s how you represent yourself in front of the Fulbright panels; all they see is what you write, so make sure that it’s good.  Okay.  I want to say a few things about my actual project.  So as I mentioned, I spent half of my time teaching, and then half of my time I was going to research civil society development and specifically how young people in Argentina are engaged in volunteerism and NGOs.  Well, I quickly learned that civic engagement is minimal, and so I focused my attention on actually getting involved in the community, and finding some community groups that I can actually engage in and get to know people.  What I ended up doing is something that actually drew on my previous professional experience.  Before going on a Fulbright I was teaching in a leadership program and spent a bit of my time teaching students how to write more effectively and prepare résumés and apply for jobs, and I saw that among students in Argentina, that was a need and they were thinking about applying for Fulbrights or other scholarship programs or jobs, and they didn’t really know how to approach writing résumés or writing cover letters.  So I ended up teaching a professional communication workshop both of the semesters I was there.  I’m so glad that I did that because I get e-mails now from students saying this was so helpful and I’m applying for the Fulbright or I applied for a job and can you read over my draft.  It’s really rewarding to see that they learned a lot.  So the lesson in that is that even though I had a pretty specific project I was open to what I found when I got to Argentina, and I think I was able to meet the needs that I found in the community and had fun doing it.  The other thing that I did that was extremely rewarding was I found this English conversation group, just a group of people that I met in a café, and I saw the sign just walking down the street one day, and I saw it in a window, and I said I guess I’ll go and check it out.  That was wonderful because while I was teaching I was interacting mainly with college age students, and this gave me the opportunity to meet people of different ages.  A lot of the people were retired, there was one high school kid.  So it really gave me exposure to different sectors of the society, and that was extremely rewarding.  One last thing because I know I’m getting close to the end here.

Jody:                Okay, let’s wrap it up.  Okay?  We need you to wrap it up.

Natalia:             Yes.  Okay, I guess I can finish right here then.

Jody:                Thank you, but we have two other speakers that we want to get to.  But before we get to them, Natalia made some really good points that I want to emphasize having particularly to do with the English Teaching Assistantship Program, and that is the project aspect of the application project as well as the grant.  Since Natalia’s been an ETA, this program has developed considerably, and one of the things that we recognize is how difficult it is for applicants to envision what kind of work, whether it’s research or study that they would engage in, in a place that they don’t even know where they’re going to be.  One of the things about the English Teaching Assistantship Program is you do not choose where you are going to be working and living; you are placed.  And in say Argentina or Chile, you are placed outside of the capital cities, you could be placed in the very northern region in Chile, in Atacama, or you could be placed in some of the southern regions of Argentina.  So it’s difficult to develop a specific project with those conditions.  But as Natalia mentioned, it’s how well you present yourself, how well you present your ideas, how well you present your interests, and in your project statement, if you’re an ETA applicant, that’s want committees are looking for.  They’re looking at how you got to this point, that is where you got the point where you wanted to apply to be a teaching assistant in another country, but also how you will use your time outside of the classroom.  What interests you?  What makes you tick?  Because, as Natalia said, you’re not going to be able to be interviewed by the committees that are going to be selecting you, so you’ve got to do as good a job as you possibly get to present yourself, who you are, and what your interests are, and the way to do it is through the essays that you prepare.  We can talk more a bit about that if you have questions later on, because I would like to move on to our next speaker.  We have Brian Murr, who was also in Argentina, but he was a study research student and was in the area of economic development, so I’ll let Brian talk next.

Brian:               My name is Bryan Muir.  I studied in Argentina in 2006, and as Jody mentioned I was there doing an economic research development, or an economic development research project, and the focus of my research was on sustainable funding strategies for nonprofit organizations.  I also, like Natalia, I applied as someone who was a young professional, so I was a little bit over a year out of school, and I did a slightly different approach.  I didn’t apply as an at large candidate.  I actually went back to the university that I graduated from and spoke to the scholarship advising office and they were able to tell me that like, you know, it’s fine, you’ve graduated, like you’re welcome to apply through us as one of our candidates.  So I don’t think there’s necessarily a right or wrong way to do it, but as a couple people have mentioned so far, it’s great.  The more people you have who are familiar with the process and are familiar with I think applying for scholarships, I think the better off your application is.  So if you are a young professional here, someone who’s a year, a few years, out of school, thinking about applying, I think it’s worth at least asking the question, even if you can’t be part of the formal application process through your school; you might be able to have people serve as informal advisors or mentors throughout the process.  For me, the project, I decided to apply for a Fulbright scholarship after working immediately after school for a nonprofit organization in Costa Rica, and the focus of my work there was on developing a sustainable funding strategy, and it was a fantastic experience and also a really frustrating one in that I found that as I was trying to work with the executive director and some of the leadership team of the organization there, one of the biggest challenges we faced was that there was not a lot of information that was easily accessible and sort of a usable, workable form to say, you know, for organizations similar to your own, like these are sorts of strategies that worked.  So I decided to apply for the Fulbright grant, and that was the resource that I was going to try to create.  I think one of the biggest challenges, and I think it’s fantastic that you guys are here and thinking about this so early, one of the biggest challenges is setting up the affiliations for your project.  I had never spent any time in Argentina, I didn’t know anybody there, and I had no idea how to go about finding any sort of person who would talk to me, and so I think like many people ended up sending lots and lots of e-mails.  No one would ever write me back, so I started making phone calls and calling other people, and talking to people from my school who had done Fulbrights, and asking them to connect me with people that they knew, and so I think part of that is just about being persistent.  I don’t know, I found that at a certain point I was annoying enough where people found it was actually easier to respond to me than it was to continue to ignore me.  And I ended up having a couple of different affiliations, and I think that’s great.  I had I think three affiliations and I worked with none of them once I got down there.  One person quit the job she was working it; she was no longer available.  I had my advisor who just wouldn’t talk to me, and then someone else I found we didn’t have the same interest.  So I think that, you know, one of the biggest lessons that I learned while I was down there is first of all you’re going to have to be like very flexible as you go about it and when you arrive things are going to be very different from how you might have expected them.  And the second thing is the, you know, the more people you can know before you get down there the better off you are, and so I think one of the greatest things about doing a Fulbright research project is it’s an independent study project and you don’t have a boss, and that was something that was really appealing to me.  I was working.  I didn’t like working.  And one of the worst parts about doing the Fulbright project is you’re doing an independent study project and you don’t have a boss, or sort of like an infrastructure there that’s available to support you.  So I think you start doing that now and before you even begin your grant make sure you talk to everybody you know who might know anything about Argentina or whatever country it is you end up applying to, and make sure that they’re expecting you, and so you build your network that way.  And then the second you arrive contact, again, anyone that you can think of.  So talk to people at the U.S. Embassy.  Talk to people who are at the Fulbright Commission who might know about your project.  But unless you ask them they might not make introductions that can be very helpful.  Get involved in volunteer organizations and volunteer activities.  So I was able to do that through an organization I worked with here in the United States that also had offices and branch chapters in Argentina.  But people also just went down and found organizations they thought were appealing.  I think that is the biggest thing.  Like the more people you can have who are aware of what you’re doing, are interested in you, and are interested in your project, the better off you can be.  I guess a last piece of this, and everyone has said it and I think it’s worth reaffirming.  The original idea that you go down with, I think it’s very unlikely that it’ll be the final thing you end up working on.  I think that’s one of the best parts about it, and so I would say the first three months I was in Argentina I would describe as an absolute disaster.  You know, you feel like you’re working all the time and you’re not getting the results you wanted, and the reality is that’s part of the process.  The fact that you made twenty five phone calls a day for a few like straight weeks, that is actually work and that is actually progress.  And if you end up changing or doing something entirely different, like it’s totally fine.  I think my experience ended up being very different from what I had expected, but also the outcome I think was similar to what I had hoped for, but I also had like peers and colleagues who were there who did a project that was completely different from their backgrounds and what they’d hoped to do, and they also viewed it as a success.

Jody:                Again, just to kind of review some points that Brian made that I think are very important, and they have to do with the affiliation.  The experiences that you have with your affiliation is again, it’s an individual experience.  Many of our grantees establish very firm and valuable affiliations before they leave.  We feel that that aspect of your grant application and your grant project is very important.  The reality also is that, as Brian and a few of the others have pointed out, it can change, and that’s fine.  But you go into the establishing of the affiliation with the idea that this will be either an organization or an individual or an academic department that will be able to support you while you’re in the host country.  And it varies from country to country in terms of how firm that affiliation needs to be.  Argentina is a little more flexible about affiliations simply because they are aware that people in Argentina often say they can do something and then their plans change and they might not be able to follow through.  A country such as Chile is much more demanding.  The affiliation needs to be very firm, well established, and the commission, if you are recommended for a grant, will check to see if your affiliation person who said they’re going to sponsor you, is really interested in sponsoring you.  So again, we talk a lot about today about if you have any questions about the relevance of some aspect of your application.  The program staff at IIE, myself, and Colleen, we’re the people that you turn to if you have specific questions about a specific aspect of your application.  You might not be to the point where you have those kinds of questions, but trust me they will come up over the next few months.  Now I’d like to turn it over to Linda is it Evarts.  Linda Evarts who was in Columbia and did a project in journalism. 

Linda:               Hi.  It’s great to see all of you here.  Since we’re talking about institutional contacts I’d like to say that prior to going to Columbia I thought that I had a very strong institutional contact.  I’d been in contact with an organization called Opcion Columbia for something like six months before I’d arrived.  We’d exchange e-mail messages you know, several times a month, sometimes several times a week, depending on what was going on, and I was very sure that I was going to go to Columbia and do a radio documentary about the work of this organization, which was sending university students to conflict ridden areas where they would do development projects.  The problem was that when I got to Columbia I found out that this organization was actually on the verge of death, that there had been a time when it had been very strong, about fifteen years earlier, and it had started a wave of similar organizations across Latin America.  However, it had been so successful that it had actually sewn the seeds of its own demise in that universities in Columbia, particularly in Bogotá, had picked up this idea it started to incorporate it into its curriculum, into their curriculums, and so the organization no longer had a population to work with.  So I found that out upon going to Columbia and had really, you know, I had just felt so lost when I first got there, and I arrived actually midway through the grant period, six months into when most people would arrive, and so all of my friends were, you know, already gung ho about their projects, well established, knew exactly what they were doing, and I was just kind of, you know, floundering along and trying to do this project.  And what I ultimately did that I think helped me out immensely was that I put out a lot of feelers in areas that I was interested in, which was basically things that had to do with radio and things that had to do with activism.  And what I ultimately would do my project about was the intersection of radio and activism in Bogotá and also in very specific other parts of Columbia.  And what I spent the bulk of my time doing was developing and teaching a series of radio and reporting workshops for displaced women that taught them everything from how to identify a story to interviewing techniques to how to produce a story in a radio station, and the route, the course of something like eight months, we were able to do a series of pieces from start to finish that are now airing on local community stations in Columbia.  Things that I would urge you very strongly to consider as you develop your application would be to think in part, I know others have said this, is to think in part about what contacts are viable from where you sit, you know, so if you have say friends who are already in the country who have established contacts, that might be a great place to start.  But in my case that didn’t work out, and I think another thing to think about is sort of sending out as many maybe feelers before you get down there as possible to see what comes back as interesting to you, but also as something that seems like, you know, a place where you would actually want to work, or people who you would actually want to work with who seem excited about you coming and you know really are getting into your ideas.  Other things that I would think about are when you’re talking to schools and trying to decide you know a curriculum that might work for you, or classes that might work for you, again sending out as many feelers as possible when talking to different professors about what sort of the environment is like in the schools that you would be going to.  Because particularly in my experience in Latin America, and this is not just in Columbia, schools tend to be very different if they’re say large public universities versus small, private, usually catholic, universities.  And so that’s something to think about before you make an institutional commitment that you might not necessarily be able to change once you get down there.  This is the school that I’m talking about that would be difficult to change.  Other parts of the process that I wanted to talk about.  Let’s see.  I think in Columbia it’s a little bit difficult to work outside of the major cities because there’s significant dangers in the countryside in a lot of places, but particularly in other countries it’s much more viable to be in other places, and I think that that would be something to think about that, you know, if you choose to apply to say Argentina, you don’t need to work in Buenos Aires, or you don’t need to work there all the time.  I did a lot of traveling when I was in Columbia and I found that to be an invaluable part of my experience, and I got to see a lot of things that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen, and meet people, and you know, view projects up close and first hand that I mean very often like no other foreigner had ever been able to witness.  It was just, it was really great to say be able to jump on board things that would otherwise have been far removed from my view.  So I would strongly urge you to think about that.  In addition when you’re thinking about your research, I had a few friends when I was down there who did things that were, did projects that, you know, were primarily based around working in say the library or the archives, which makes a lot of sense depending on what you’re doing.  But if you are interested at all in the hands on experience I would urge you to think about that substantially because what I found is that, you know, my, the parts of my project that I loved the best and the parts that started to be the vast majority of what I did was working within local communities and spending great deal of time with individuals.  And also, I mean, just given my own experience, I would really urge you to think about if Fulbright Latin America is for you before you apply.  I know that across the board we’ve been talking about how you really need to be flexible and you need to be able to be outside your comfort zone and to say enjoy the experience of being pushed outside your regular limits.  Something else to think about in Latin America is that bureaucracy is rampant and can be really tough to deal with.  I found this out when I was trying to design my own project using partners who I didn’t know originally.  And I had to on one hand, you know, approach the situation and be passionate about what I was doing and to plan out in advance about what I was trying to do, but also to be flexible when I realized that some institutions and some bureaucracies just were not going to give way, and so it was this constant sort of balancing act in the beginning, trying to negotiate that territory.  So think about that.  Think about if you’re going to be okay in that situation and if you’ll be able to continue going at it when, you know, your original say fifteen projects fall by the wayside, if your original doesn’t work out.  And also, yes, I’m done.