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Transcript For: Interview with Jermaine Jones on Applications to Near East

Valerie and Tony interview Jermaine Jones about the Fulbright program to the Near East.

Tony and Valerie interview Jermaine Jones (Near East)

Tony: Alright, welcome to the Fulbright US student podcast, we are your hosts,

Valerie: Valerie Hymas, Senior Program Manager, Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia.

Tony: And I’m Tony Claudino, Director of the Fulbright Student Outreach. In this podcast we’ll be interviewing Jermaine Jones, for the Near East.

Valerie: The Near East is a fascinating world region, and what part of the world does that actually encompass Jermaine, tell me, is that the Middle East or the Far East or what?

Jermaine: It’s actually the Middle East and North Africa, so pretty much everything between let’s say Morocco, spreading across the northern part of Africa all the way over to the Persian Gulf peninsula I guess you could say. From Morocco let’s say to Oman.

Valerie: Great. And we asked you this when we were talking about sub-Saharan Africa, but for this particular world region are there any fields of study that you tend to see a lot of applicants trying for or is it open or are there any trends that you can talk about?

Jermaine: The most popular field the past several years has been Islamic Studies and that’s kind of a big catchall. But it really ranges from everything from more contemporary issues such as political science to history, some people want to do Arabic language study only projects as well, and those are only possible in three countries in the region: Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

Tony: So that means they can apply to Egypt and just study Arabic, on a Fulbright?

Jermaine: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. You can certainly apply to Egypt or again, Syria or Jordan, with a project that’s solely involved for their Arabic language study. Now one thing to keep in mind is that you cannot submit an application for Arabic language study only if you have no prior experience in the language.

Valerie: So you have to have studied it for….

Jermaine: …at least a year. You’ll need to have a fairly solid foundation in Arabic in order to be competitive for one of those kinds of grants.

Tony: So if they won the Summer Institute award, that could get them up to speed?

Valerie: Or even the Critical Language Enhancement Award that we offer as a pre-grant opportunity. So conceivably, they could go for 6 months on the Critical Language Enhancement Award and then 9 – 10 months on a Fulbright and spend some significant time.

Jermaine: That would be a fantastic way to come back very fluent if not very proficient in the language.

Tony: As you can see, Valerie and I already interviewed Joe about the Critical Language Enhancement Awards. That’s why Valerie …

Valerie: We did we talked about that so … Listeners please download that and listen to that if you are interested.

So, within the Near East program, are there any opportunities to teach English, or are they traditional full Fulbright research and study grants?

Jermaine: I’m afraid that there are no English Language Teaching Assistantships anywhere in the Near East – North Africa region actually. So, once again, for those countries in that world region you can only apply for regular full Fulbright grants, for research and/or study.

Tony: Now is the Near East similar to Africa in that it’s a regional program as well or are there countries that

Valerie: that do individual country competitions?

Tony: Well, Morocco probably does individual I would assume.

Jermaine: The four countries in the region that have bi-national Fulbright commissions or foundations are Egypt, Israel, Jordon and Morocco, and those are countries that have predetermined numbers of grants. In other words they have individual country quotas. Every other country in the region is part of the Near East North Africa regional program, which again means that there’s no fixed number of grants by country, but a larger regional quota. I think it’s roughly 32 for the larger Near East North Africa South and Central Asia region and that basically means, once again, that there’s no predetermined number of grants for the noncommissioned countries, but that we will try to distribute the grants as evenly as possible, again depending on the quality of each individual applicant, among the different countries as possible.

Valerie: Is there a specific time of year when you find that the grantees actually go, do they go in the fall, or is the academic year reversed there at all, or how does that work?

Jermaine: Most grantees to this region tend to start their grants in the fall, in some countries in the region, especially those with commissions, do have in-country orientation programs that they strongly recommend, if not require their grantees to attend but I have to say that even in countries where there is no in country group orientation, most grantees do tend to head out in the fall.

Tony: How about multi-country proposals? Do the same rules apply as what you mentioned in Africa?

Jermaine: Same rules apply, again the countries that have their own Fulbright commissions, the four that I just mentioned, Egypt, Israel, Jordon and Morocco, you can only apply to those countries, they cannot be part of a multi-country proposal. But the other countries, the remaining countries in the region I should say, they can be part of a multi-country application.

Valerie: And of course, if they do that, they have to think about visa, and residence permits, as well as research clearance issues, as well as affiliation issues. I know you talked about it before, but can we touch upon it again for those who are particularly interested in this region.

Jermaine: That’s right. The big consideration in terms of multi-country proposals for this region would be getting approval from each country to which they applied because, once again, as I mentioned in the case of sub-Saharan Africa, getting rejected by one country with a multi-country proposal could really jeopardize one’s chances of receiving the grant at all. In terms of affiliation and clearance, that’s not that big of an issue for these countries because generally speaking the sponsoring agency in the host country, either the US Embassy or the Fulbright Commission, will take care of securing the affiliation and taking care of the needed clearances or permits for their grantees.

Valerie: Does that work also with grantees submitting a single country proposal? Do those host supervising agencies also help them with the affiliation process?

Jermaine: Yes, yes they do. Having said that though, I have to say that it still behooves applicants to at least look into what organization or institution they would like to be affiliated with. Again in a lot of these cases the Embassy or the Commission will have final responsibility in terms of placing them with the appropriate host institution in the country but I think it still looks kind of bad for the grantee to just leave it completely to the sponsoring agency in the country and not take any initiative on their own end to at least look into which kind of institutions would make the most sense for their project needs.

Tony: So they should still be proactive about it.

Jermaine: Absolutely, absolutely.

Tony: Anything else you want to add?

Valerie: Well, I was really interested in the trends, the topics that people are often applying to, but I wanted to also ask are there any fields of study or subjects that are off limits to some of these countries. Cause obviously there are some issues that are pretty hot topics throughout, for the world community in general, but is there anything that people should avoid, that may be politically sensitive?

Jermaine: I think it’s really smart for people to sort of use their common sense in terms of thinking about projects that might seem like they’re going to be too politically risky in some way, then they probably are, you should probably try to avoid them. And that’s especially true in a couple of countries. Egypt is the big one actually because Egypt has a fairly strenuous research clearance process. In other words, every application that the Fulbright commission in Egypt wants to offer a grant to has to be vetted with the Egyptian Ministry of Higher Education, and those applications that are deemed too sensitive for either political, cultural or social reasons, by the Ministry are denied clearance. And when you’re denied the clearance for Egypt that means that means that you cannot be offered a grant. Now I have to say that, the past couple of years projects that have dealt with issues such as Islamic fundamentalist revivalist movements as well as projects dealing with Sudanese refugee issues in that country have almost to a person, to an application been denied clearance, so those are two areas for that particular country that I would advise students to steer away from. And for Syria, people will see when they read the Syria country summary, that we steer people away from projects dealing with modern social science kinds of issues. In other words, things that deal with contemporary political issues, they should really steer away from, again for obvious reasons, so…

Valerie: I guess it sounds to me like you’re the best source of information; candidates interested in these topics should be talking to you for your guidance.

Tony: They should probably look at the website and then get your contact information as well.

Jermaine: That would be the best order of things. Look at the website first and then contact me if they have any further questions. And in some cases, some countries might list in country contact information, especially those countries with Fulbright commissions. And in those cases, if it’s listed in the website or the brochure, then they should feel free to contact the commissions for further insights or advise if they need to.

Tony: Great. Well thank you very much Jermaine.

Valerie: Thanks Jermaine.

Jermaine: You’re welcome; thank you.