Experience Fulbright

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

Hello and thanks for joining me! I’m excited to share my Fulbright journey with you.

For those who don’t know me, I’m a Psychology Professor and yoga teacher from Minnesota. I love teaching and I also love to travel. It is my good fortune to be able to combine both of these loves through the Fulbright Scholar program.

I suppose that you would like to know where exactly it is that I am heading. Good question. I don’t have the exact details of my placement yet, but I know that I will be somewhere in Uzbekistan.

I know what you are thinking…

Ok, so now that you know where Uzbekistan is, more or less, let’s back up and talk about how I came be to a Fulbright scholar in the first place.

Want to learn more about the Fulbright program? Click here.

I’ve been aware of the Fulbright program for many years but it wasn’t until 2 years ago that I seriously considered applying to the program.  You see, I love teaching. Because I love teaching, much more than doing research, I took a job at a community college early in my career. At a community college, you really do get to focus on the teaching and learning process. While research is valued, there isn’t the same kind of pressure on the faculty to conduct research as you’d find at a University. I’ve been very happy teaching and being a leader on faculty development but I never really considered that I could become a Fulbright scholar, because, well, honestly, I’m not a well known scholar in my field. I figured that I wasn’t Fulbright material, since I was an expert in the teaching and learning process, rather than an expert researcher.

Then I attended a national conference for community college faculty. One of the sessions was about the Fulbright scholar program. I listened to the speaker explain that the Fulbright program had both research and teaching grants. He also said that they were specifically looking to recruit more community college faculty. At that time the percentage of community college faculty applying for grants was around 11% of all applicants.  It was around this same time that I found out one of my colleagues had received a Fulbright grant to do research in Hungary. Maybe I did have a shot at this after all. So I decided that I ought to take a closer look.

I spent months pouring over the catalog of awards, reading about different countries and their requirements. At first, I was overwhelmed by how many options there were and how long the application process was.

Check out the Fulbright Scholar Awards Catalog and see for yourself.

I started to fill in some basic information about myself in the online application while continuing to research the different country awards. The August 1, 2016 deadline came and went without me making much progress. But I hadn’t abandoned the idea. I just needed more time to let it all sink in. All during the Fall semester I kept returning to the Fulbright website to look over the awards and consider where I’d most want to go and what I would do there. I let the ideas just roll around in my head while I was focused on other work. By the winter break I had mentally committed myself to the application process and decided that I would apply to teach and do faculty development work at the Royal University of Bhutan. That’s right. I applied to Bhutan, not Uzbekistan, but we will get to all that later.  For now, I was committed to applying to Bhutan and I was going to do everything I could to submit a competitive grant. In my next blog post I will walk you through my process of preparing my grant application.