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Transcript For: Fulbright Alumni Roundtable - Western Hemisphere Q&A Part 2

Fulbright Alumni Roundtable - Western Hemisphere Q&A Part 2. Fulbright Alumni and Jody Dudderar, Fulbright Manager for the Western Hemisphere, take questions from the audience.

Questions and Answers, Western Hemisphere Part 2

Jody:                Washington, do we have any other questions?

Student 7:         I’m interested in studying public attitudes toward government and attitudes towards corruption, and I’m wondering in all of your experiences, how have you navigated the politically sensitive waters in your projects?  How could I reframe this topic in a way that might be more amenable to the Fulbright program?

Jody:                First of all, a sensitive topic does not mean it cannot be done.  As you just stated, it’s the way you frame the approach that you’re taking to a controversial or sensitive topic.  One of the things that Fulbright is sensitive to is over activism.  It’s not intended to support particular views, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t, as a student or scholar, investigate, study, look at these topics or have a view.  But you’re looking at it from a more objective standpoint.  I think to answer your question specifically is to present the topic from an academic or from a scholarly point of view and not strictly as an activist.  Does that make sense?

Student 7:         Yup.  Thank you.

Jody:                Okay.  If there’s no other questions in Washington, it’s time to bring it on home.  We have a nice group here in New York.

Student 8:         I’m wondering how everyone felt in your time abroad with your day to day budget.  Would you advise applicants to plan in a certain way financially?

Jody:                That’s a good question.  Who would like to speak to how you managed your money when you were abroad?

Natalia:             I would like to speak to one aspect of it.  This is Natalia in Houston.  In Argentina there were a lot of discrepancies regarding housing costs between the different cities where all the ETAs were located.  I was lucky to be in a city where housing was abundant for the students in the off season because it’s a tourist city in the summer, so they have a lot of extra housing and it was pretty inexpensive.  But some of my colleagues had serious problems because there were just no apartments available in their town.  One girl had to purchase a fridge, so that can be a drain on your budget.  Overall though I have to say that the stipend we received in Argentina was sufficient.

Jody:                The Fulbright grant, just to give you ‘the line’, is a basic travel and maintenance grant.  We get you there and we provide you with a stipend that allows you to live what we would call a graduate student existence.  Some countries you can make that stipend go a bit further than others, but you will know in advance what the stipend is, and it is adequate.  It’s not overly generous, but it’s adequate for most countries and most cities.  If you do have a project that has a lot of research expenses, either you have a lot of equipment as Linda mentioned she had in her project, or you have a high research costs.  If it’s an equipment issue you, you probably should bring it with you because the Fulbright grant does not provide much in the way of support of research.  If you have high research cost, you know you’re going to need to do a lot in archives, whether it’s copy materials or procuring materials, you might actually have to look for another grant that will help you cover those research expenses.  As I said, this is a basic travel and research grant.  Next question. 

Student 9:         Hi.  My question is for the past applicants that you’ve had.  Has anybody gone with the goal and success of actually getting their graduate degree at one of their host countries?

Jody:                Yeah.  I know they do it.

Linda:               No one that I know of in Columbia has gotten a master’s degree, but I’m one of a handle of people when I was there who got what’s called a specialization, and it’s a first year of a master’s in a specific field.  I think the reason why we’re able to do that is because Anne Macon, who’s the head of the mission in Columbia, essentially created the program that we did.  She was the head of the department in the university that we studied in, and so that definitely helped in our being approved to do that work.  From what I understand, it depends entirely on the school and the country and the feeling of the commission regarding that program.

Student 9:         But as a whole is it actually a possibility as far as the applicants go?

Jody:                No, it’s not a possibility.  It’s a two year program.  The Fulbright grant is a one year grant program.  You might be able to start a degree program, but you might not be able to finish it.  Mexico.  If you want to do a degree in Latin America, Mexico has a graduate degree Fulbright grant.  It’s a multi year grant.  It is renewable and you can undertake two years if it’s a master’s program or three years if it’s a doctoral program.  They will give you funding.  A graduate degree as the reason for the grant is not a strong proposal in and of itself.  You can have that as a personal goal, but you still need to present a project that can be completed in one academic year.  It might form the basis of some graduate work that you would do, but if you just say I want to get a graduate degree and I’m going to take classes, and I’m going to do this, you’re not going to get a grant.  But if you say I’m going to work toward a graduate degree and this is what I’m going to do while I’m in the country working on this grant, then it would be more viable.

Student 9:         Okay, thank you. 

Sam:                 In Mexico I can speak to that because a lot of my fellow grantees were in that program.  There actually was a girl who started out as a one year study and research grantee and then she switched and she did go into the master’s program.  I would not advise to do that because it’s not a guarantee.  She was extremely lucky to get that extra funding, and it’s just when somebody ends up leaving I think she snagged that extra funding.  I would urge you though to consider it.  And I’m not speaking either way because some of my very good friends did that and I didn’t.  The one thing I would urge you to take very deeply into consideration is what you want with this year.  Because when you’re undertaking a degree, yes, like Jody said, you have to have a proposal for a one year project, but the degree is going to occupy a lot of your time.  I was part of a master’s program but I only took two classes and they were three hour classes.  So I was in classes six hours a week just doing a part time thing, and that stretched me in terms of, I had to work really, really hard to do all my field work and keep up with my classes.  Just think about what you want to be involved in because school community, just really take that to heart. 

Jody:                I think that Sam’s advice is very good and that’s probably one of the reasons why people don’t pursue degrees with a Fulbright grant necessarily.  You do lose that independent aspect of the grant to pursue your own research project and your own community activities.  It’s possible; we don’t want to say don’t do it, but weigh those issues.  Next.

Student 10:       I was just wondering, a lot of the applicants talked how at the beginning they had a very concrete goal, idea, and then it’s about the process and the experience, and I’m just wondering if people could talk a little bit about what they actually ended up with at the end as far as product of your experience.

Brian:               Great question.  Speaking about the classes that I was with there in Argentina, I think that the products were very different.  I ended up with something that was basically in line what I had initially proposed, although the path to actually getting those results was very different.  What I proposed to do was to study non profit organizations throughout Argentina but also Latin America, and try and identify the best practices in alternative funding strategies, so ways for the organizations to fund their social programs that didn’t involve getting money from either governments or large philanthropic organizations.  During my time there the affiliations I looked for, knowing that I would need to get access to lots of different organizations and not only just access it at a superficial level but really to be able to understand how they got their money and the intricacies of their different funding strategies.  I tried to identify affiliations with organizations that already had lots of contacts.  The group that I tried to work with initially didn’t work out, but I did find a large international NGO called Ashoka, which is based in Washington, DC.  They have a network of their Ashoka fellows, which are social entrepreneurs throughout the world.  Working with them I was able to do research on dozens of organizations and write case studies on the most successful approach to be found.  One of the benefits of working with an organization like Ashoka is they also provided a medium to communicate those results.  The work that I, I’ve continued working with them on the project, is going to be part of a book that the working title is 150 Ways, and it’s going to be 150 innovative strategies from around the world to do that. 

Jody:                Does anybody else want to relate a story about their outcomes?

Sam:                 I didn’t go into it with a specific thing, but having come off of my senior year thesis, I was like I could do another academic paper, but then I decided I didn’t want to.  So I developed two things throughout the year.  Actually, I would say the first three months of my project I devoted to really thinking about what do I want out of this?  So the group I worked with I ended up, the first small project I did was a export and fair trade analysis manual, so I basically looked at all the aspects of their business and analyzed them from the perspective of how viable would exporting be and worked with a couple actually service students in figuring out what a fair wage is and doing all those analysis of their products, their costs, etcetera.  The second thing I did which was my main project was I connected in depth interviews with all the women there and it’s basically turned into a written history, which is taking the form of a book, but I want it to be a book that the community will have.  So I’ve actually been back since to continue my research.  It’s in the rough form of that now.  You just have to figure out what suits you. 

Afreen:             I think what happens is a lot of people, I mean, I was writing a bunch about my organization in my time there and some of my stuff was published, and my products were sort of along the way.  Each piece was its own product.  After I came back I presented on Sistren a bunch and created a website for them.  So it wasn’t concrete in that I didn’t produce a long forty-five page paper, but things definitely were produced. 

Jody:                That is one thing about the Fulbright grant.  We don’t require a product at the end of your grant period.  In writing your grant proposal it’s probably not a bad idea to talk about ways that you might be able to share whatever research or information that you’re doing, but as you’re learning here today, reality often does not match expectations, and that’s okay.  I will say, in my years of working with the Fulbright program, most grantees do have something at the end of their grant, whether it’s something that they’re publishing or something that they’ll continue working on with their organization.  Very few grantees end their grant and never go back to what they did before.  In almost every case we find that you do develop your own product, and again, it’s a very individual thing. 

Linda:               I think it’s important to be open to the idea of the form of your project changing over time.  I had gone into my process thinking I was going to make a documentary, which would be maybe an hour, an hour and a half, presentation as a whole.  That ended up turning into a lot of shorter pieces based on who I met and what their interests were and what we found as a common ground. 

Brian:               Jody, you mentioned that talking about what the product is, I guess most people do in their applications, and that was one of the things that I used.  It isn’t an essential element if you can do it, if your projects lends itself to that.  The mission of the Fulbright Program is to promote mutual understanding.  If you can directly relate the research you’re doing to that mission and have it be an essential element of what you’re trying to do, I think it strengthens your application. 

Jody:                I would agree with that.  I think the idea that you’re leaving something, you’re not just taking from this experience but you’re leaving something behind.  We have another question. 

Student 11:       Hi.  For the ETA grantee, I’m wondering in the application process did you have to prove any teaching experience or future interest in teaching, and how you worked that in your application.

Jody:                Okay.  Do you want to take that, Natalia?

Natalia:             I happened to have several years of experience and an ESL Teaching Certificate, so I was actually afraid that that might hurt me in the application process, that I was too over qualified.  But I know that in my cohort there were people both who had experience and those who had no teaching experience whatsoever.  I think as an ETA, in the essay I would encourage you to talk about how you can be a resource to the students that you’re going to be working with.  You have enough experience from just being a student in the United States to be able to come up with things that you can focus on.  So formal teaching experience I believe was not a requirement.

Jody:                She’s absolutely right.  We have a very mixed bag and they look at mixing that bag when they make the final selections.  We have people who apply who have good, serious teaching credentials, not too many because we actually state if you’ve got a master’s degree plus experience you would probably be over qualified, but we also are looking at ETA candidates, people who have the potential, the desire, or the inclination to be good teachers.  And that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have specific experience, but that you’ve engaged in activities either as a tutor or in situations that you’ve shown your leadership ability, that you’re creative, that you’re flexible, and that you can walk into a classroom and be, as Natalia said, a resource for that classroom in teaching about English.  And also, one thing about the ETA program, you become a spokesperson for the United States.  We’re not talking about a spokesperson for the government for the United States.  We’re talking about for the people, the culture, and to talk about those issues.  So in the ETA program they’re also looking at presentation skills and their public speaking skills, and that all comes through in successful applications in various ways.  Any other questions in New York?  Yes, please come up to the microphone.

Student 12:       Hi.  A question for everyone I guess.  Given that so many of you did research in rural communities, did you have any problems with indigenous languages, and if so how did you deal with that?

Sam:                 My grant proposal was to work with indigenous women and do ethnic graphic research, so I was interviewing and basically I was extremely, extremely close with this small group of women.  I feel like I lived there.  I did sometimes.  Depending on their backgrounds, many of them spoke Spanish, I would say maybe a third fluently.  But the other two thirds, some of them not at all, and some broken.  So I took Nahuatl classes when I was there, and I asked questions, and I was annoying, and I listened to conversations, and I tried as hard as I could to get involved.  Then obviously when you need to get into technical interviewing issues you have a translator.  But like Sylvia was saying, my research depended on an exact not only literal but emotional, figurative translation.  So you really have to be very careful and selective in who you get to translate for you.  I obviously have hours and hours of recordings of interviews.  Sometimes you might want to get them translated twice.  In my case I had to figure out what was better: to have the interview translated right as it happened or when it was over.  So there’s different techniques you have to experiment with, but I definitely would address that language issue in your thing.  As Jody said, I did, even though I wasn’t a hundred percent sure how I would do it. 

Jody:                It’s almost time to wrap up.  Does anybody have one last compelling question?  Okay.  I want to thank everybody for coming, I want to thank our alumni participants for giving their time.  In the regions, thank you for joining us.  Houston, thank you for being there.  Perhaps Natalia and Sylvia will stay around if any of the Houston people want to talk to them.  In New York we’ll stay around a little bit longer.  Let me just say to everyone, as I’ve said already, if you have any specific questions about the process please feel free to e-mail or call Colleen or myself.  Our information is on our website www.fulbrightonline.org.  In the link to ‘contacts’ you’ll find our phone number and e-mail addresses.  As I said, make sure your questions are specific so that we can really address what your issues are.  Thank you for coming!