(This is also a cross-post from my substack that I thought might find interested readers here.)
For a very long time, probably more than a decade, I inflicted on myself the exact same agonizing stab of frustration year after year. It always happened in mid-August at the first faculty meeting: my boss, the now-retired Dr. Dennis Lindsay, would mention in passing that if we could secure grant funding for any of our doings, that would be good news. I would dutifully fire up Google to hunt for grants that supported teaching and research about interpersonal communication, and confirm yet again that there just aren’t many. But every single time, I would stumble across this. It was always tantalizing, but the deadline was always September 15, and you cannot put together a competitive Fulbright application that quickly, especially while simultaneously getting a full load of classes ready to teach. There’s simply no way.
But in August 2020 I got fed up with my unlearnable lesson, and I put a reminder in my Outlook calendar for May 2021, the week after the school year would end, titled “Apply for the Fulbright, drum class!” (It didn’t say drum class, but it rhymed.) When May rolled around, I cleared my schedule and spent seven weeks researching and drafting my proposal, including asking colleagues to write the required support letters. All those years when I had only two to three weeks, it was hopeless, but when I took seven weeks, I found it very do-able.
From the day I’m posting this, the 2023 application deadline is three months away — twelve weeks, give or take. Nearly twice what I needed.
So … what are you waiting for?
These are the tips I can pass along from my own experience.
- Crumple up and throw away your preconceived notions about what a Fulbright is. For the standard grant, you have to be fluent in the language of your destination, and you have to find a university in that country that will write you a letter of invitation and agree to be your host school. But the standard grant is not all there is! Mine spelled out that grant activity should be conducted in English, and Fulbright would assign me a Japanese host school. The Fulbright catalog is full of outlier awards, and you should go shopping for a good one. They frequently have webinars titled “Hidden Gems,” so check out the archived one, and get on their mailing list(s) so you’re in the know when they schedule an updated one.
- Learn everything you can about your destination country. Most of my seven weeks of work went into slow, unhurried searching, reading and thinking. I needed to find the most focused, specific, concrete social issue in Japan that my academic strengths would equip me to address. It’s the old advice about job hunting: don’t tell your interviewer why the job is perfect for you, but instead why what you bring to the table will be a huge boost for the employer. Make the case, with detailed references, that this would be a win-win for you and your host country. I found a strategy document from the Japanese Ministry of Education that set as a high priority helping English learners in Japan become more successful in encounters that require assertiveness. I pointed out that I am an interpersonal communication teacher with a background in competitive debate, and pitched my lessons as potentially the different approach to assertiveness skill building that could crack open the problem that had them stuck.
- Use Fulbright’s language. Read and re-read the web site until you’ve digested it. Borrow the language they use to describe their mission, and repeat it verbatim anywhere it fits. And pay careful attention to the details of their selection process; I remember reading that they give preference to applicants from universities that have received fewer grants, so I pointed out that I would be the first ever from Bushnell. For this tip and the one above it, your objective is to bowl them over with how thoroughly you did your homework and how tightly you wove your discoveries into every single sentence of your project statement.
- This is not the time to be modest. Make the case for yourself. I was applying for the teaching grant, so I said some really obnoxiously self-puffing things about my past haul of teaching awards. That would make me extremely uncomfortable in any normal setting, but they need tiebreakers to separate applicants into upper and lower tiers, so I did my best to supply what would help them compare me favorably. Their process works best if everybody brags (truthfully) about themselves at full intensity and they then sort the sales pitches into the best fit with country needs, so brag (truthfully) with everything you’ve got and let them figure it out.
- Have a talk with God. This was by far the most important step in the entire undertaking. I had the exact same talk dozens of times. I said “God, if I’m just doing this to be a tourist, slam the door and keep me in the United States. But I am trusting You that the door will only open if You have work for me to do in Japan. And I further trust that if You do have work for me to do in Japan, then no power on Earth can keep the door closed.” I had that talk with Him before I clicked submit, and I recapped it endless times between then and when I received my acceptance. It let me relax and not fret over the choices and nuances, and it also put pressure on me to be scrupulously honest in every detail, since God cannot be glorified by a lie. Best of all, throughout the months of preparation between my acceptance and my departure, every time a problem appeared, I just reminded God of our deal, and it was easy for me to stay calm and be certain the problems would work out. And they did.
Here’s how I’d think about it: of Aristotle’s artistic proofs, pathos is in the audience, ethos is in the speaker, and logos is in the message, so treat that as a checklist and a balancing guide. Impress the reviewers with how up-to-date and detailed your claims about your destination country are, boast truthfully about your own strengths for the purpose of cementing your credibility, and speak their language in casting your vision so that they’re excited at the thought of sending you out to represent them.
And if my advice lands you a #Fulbright, you have to bring me back a souvenir.
