Let’s talk a little bit about the Fulbright timeline. It’s a very long process from beginning to end. If you recall from my previous posts, I first looked into the Fulbright program during the 2015-2016 academic year. I wasn’t ready to apply by August 1, 2016 but did get my application submitted in the next round. With my application submitted by the August 2017 deadline, I couldn’t do anything other than wait to hear back from the Fulbright committee.

According to the Fulbright website, the first round of application reviews are done by peers in your discipline who make a recommendation to the Regional Fulbright Committee sometime in Sept-Oct. The Regional committee then meets in DC sometime in Oct-Nov. to decide which applications will be forwarded along to the host countries. Applicants don’t hear anything about the status of their application until this process is completed in November or December.  That means I have 4-5 months to wait.

So….while we wait, why don’t I circle back to that email I sent to the previous Fulbright scholars in Bhutan. As I said, I felt uneasy about reaching out to them via email. For some reason, as small part of me was worried that emailing them for information would make me appear less competent.  I am so glad I didn’t listen to that voice. Reaching out to the Fulbright scholars who had been in Bhutan was tremendously helpful. I reached out to the scholar who was in Bhutan at that time (Spring 2017) and to another person who had been there a few years earlier. Both were Psychology professors and both replied to my email that same day with offers to set up a time to chat via phone.

I spoke with both of those scholars, one of whom was still in Bhutan when he called me. Both were incredibly friendly and more than willing to talk with me about their Fulbright experience. (more on this later) In fact, they gave me such helpful information that I substantially revised my project proposal after speaking with them. (Remember that I spoke with them in March-April and didn’t submit my completed application until July, 2017.) If you are considering applying for a Fulbright grant, you should definitely reach out to former Fulbright scholars. Their insight could be invaluable.

Alright, where were we before I took that diversion? Oh right, waiting…

I tried to put it out of my mind but as November came closer I found myself checking my email more frequently than usual and by usual I mean about 10 times a day.  According to the official Fulbright website, applicants will be notified in November-December as to whether or not they passed the first round of review. Well, November came and went and I hadn’t heard anything. I was truly starting to worry that I hadn’t made the first cut.

Want to see the Fulbright timeline for yourself? Check it out here.

From the beginning of this process I played my cards close to the vest. Outside of my husband and the people who wrote the letters of recommendation for me, I didn’t tell anyone that I had applied for a Fulbright grant. This isn’t so much because I was afraid I’d “jinx” it but more because I didn’t want to have to go back to all those people and tell them I did NOT get selected, if that ended up being the case.

Finally, on December 11, 2017, when I was just wrapping up final exam week of the fall semester, I received the email I had been waiting for.  The email simply said that the first round of application reviews had been completed and then referred to an attached letter. If only this had been a paper letter. I would have torn into it and thrown the envelope on the floor while frantically trying to unfold the letter. As it was, this was an email so it was a little less dramatic. I just clicked on the attachment and opened the .pdf file. Here’s a screenshot of that file:

So I made it past round one! Yeah! Now I started to cautiously tell a few people here and there about my application. I made it past the peer review process in DC and now my application was being sent to Bhutan along with all the other finalists. I had no idea how many of us there were, but I did know that there was only 1 spot in Bhutan for a Fulbright scholar.  Each time I told someone about my application I would add the caveat that Fulbright grants were highly competitive and that there was only one spot in Bhutan but still, I was optimistic about my chances. And I was back in the waiting game…

January…February… No word…March.. Still no word. According to the Fulbright timeline the in-country review process happens from Nov-April, which is a really big window when you are the one obsessively checking you email for news.

Finally, on April 12, four months after my first email, I received the message I had been waiting for, with the results of the final in-country review process. Unfortunately, this attached letter did NOT have the news I had been hoping for.  This was a rejection letter:

I know what you are thinking, “But Laurie, I thought you received a Fulbright grant! I’m confused. What happened? Why are you writing this blog and why did you say you are going to Uzbekistan.”

Those are all great questions… that I will answer in my next blog post so stay tuned!

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.