Fun With Funding: The Fulbright Award

Fulbright HQ Battersea

If you’re from the UK and have ever expressed an interest in studying in the US or vice versa, chances are you will have come across the Fulbright Commission.

The organisation funds students who wish to cross the Atlantic for academic purposes of all kinds; it is extremely prestigious and extremely competitive.

I am writing this on the train home from London, having handed in my application for this award in person at Battersea power station. This- clearly- was not my original plan, however I discovered on Friday that I needed to send them a hard copy, missed the post on Saturday, discovered that no courier service was working on bank holiday Monday and finally took it myself on the day it was due.

This experience was discouraging to say the least, but it has inspired me to share what I know of the application process with all of you, so that should you ever decide to apply, you can learn from my mistakes and hopefully be more successful.

First off, if you are applying for Fulbright, or thinking of doing so, and you haven’t graduated with a 1^st class degree, set up a charity in Africa to help starving orphans, fronted a Broadway musical, started your own company researching sustainable energy or been junior ambassador to China, prepare to be made to feel extremely inadequate by the recent award winners section of the website.

If you do soldier on through to the application form itself, you will be faced with a dizzying array of questions, from the simple (name, address etc.) to the not so simple (which universities do you want to apply to  and why) to the downright confusing (how have you achieved your current objectives- disregarding the impossibility of having achieved something you are still currently aiming for of course.).

The most important elements are the personal statement, your research objectives and your GRE scores. That last requires a post in and of itself so I won’t address it here but for the others you need to provide a clear and detailed discussion of your research objectives and your reasons for wanting to pursue them (despite that fact that many faculties in the US prefer students not to have a fixed doctoral project) and a ‘narrative statement’ describing your career up until this point, highlighting significant factors that have influenced your educational or professional development.

When you have cobbled together something vaguely plausible for these two sections, you come to the part where you upload your exam transcripts.

And then, if you’re me, you get stuck on this step for a week and a half.

It’s not that I’m blaming the website, but faffing about with such a trivial thing when they wanted a hard copy anyway simply detracted from the amount of time I spent on the important, potentially approval-deciding aspects of my application.

Assuming you make it through the application process and successfully submit your application- both virtually and in paper format (although hopefully without having to provide your own courier service) and they don’t reject you out of hand, you then have to prepare for the interview.

A session with my handy neighbourhood careers advisor and a perusal of feedback received from the students who went through the process recently , threw out the following topics for interview questions:

How do you see yourself as equipped to fulfil and ambassadorial role

Give and example of a situation where you have demonstrated leadership

How do you give back to the community?

What is your commitment to the Fulbright program and its objectives?

How would you resolve a political problem currently affecting the US?

(These are a sampling of my favourites and best illustrate the feeling of hopelessness with which I came away from the Careers office.)

This article is more of a what not to do when applying to Fulbright than anything else, but I hope I have provided at least some useful information to those of you considering applying. If you have any further questions about any of this, feel free to ask them in the comments and if you have been successful in your application, I would love to hear all about your scheme for saving orphans and using them as a form of renewable energy to power your think tank for solving the middle east problem.