Representing yourself

Sorry for the long post, but the migraine medicine is keeping me up against my will tonight.

After a bit more angst, I completely rewrote my personal statement for the Fulbright, slightly revised a few parts of my proposal, and turned the whole thing in today - one day earlier than the if-at-all-possible deadline, and 11 days earlier than the absolutely-last-day-possible deadline.  I still have to translate both items into Spanish - and if at all possible I want to have those done by next Wednesday.  I hope to have it done by Monday night or Tuesday morning, get a few native speakers to read over them and make sure I'm saying what I think I'm saying, make revisions, and turn it in on Wednesday. 

I probably am most concerned about the personal statement.  To be blunt, I had no idea what I was doing with it.  Last year, I was told to explain why I study Spain, why I love it, how I got there.  So I traced my journey to studying Spain through high school, college, and graduate school.  The only response I got - show us more about you loving Spain.  

So this year I wrote a new personal statement and tried to show my passion for the people, place, and histories.  I spent much more time talking about my time in Madrid in 2006.  The response I got - it's too "intellectual" and we want more of your biography.  

So I went back to the drawing board.  I started getting frustrated because people kept talking about sharing your story of how you overcame things to get where you are.  But, really, I don't have a come-from-behind story.  I'm more the tortoise in the story - slow and steady, moving up little by little, keeping an eye on the goal.  I don't have a bad home life - my parents are still together after 35 years, my grandparents have been married for 65 years, and my other grandparents were married 52 years before my grandfather passed away.  I always was a good student, had no learning disabilities, didn't live in bad neighborhoods, etc.  

I talked with one of the only people in the office who had applied for this grant, and we talked about how they want a little bit of everything: your family background, interests, intellectual biography, career goals, how you'll be an ambassador, etc.  She said something that I think helped lead to a breakthrough: "Remember that you are writing for the National Committee and the nation's committee.  They don't have the benefit of meeting you in person, so you need to try to get across who you are, your personality."  

With that piece of advice in mind, I decided to just write a brand new statement.  I thought about who I am as a person - if someone hadn't met me, how could I try to help them see *me*?  I came up with a few things: my family, my faith, my travels, my studies, and teaching.  So this time, I started out talking about my parents - their dedication and hard work, my dad's love of history, our history-based vacations (of which there were *many,* trust me!), and my dad quizzing me before history tests (and telling me more stories to make things more exciting).  Then I talked about my parents' encouragement for my brother and me to explore the world and give back - primarily in the US through our church and through missions work abroad.  To try to get in some of my "outside interests," I talked about how my fascination with history began infiltrating everything - so much so that I was even slightly distracted by the living history around me while singing in St. Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, or in the abbey on Iona, or at Stirling Castle - and so I chose to study history.  I actually only discussed why I study Spain in a few sentences, and then spoke about my goals as an educator, trying to explain why the Fulbright is vital for me as both a student and a teacher.  

I showed it to my advisor, who responded quite positively.  He thought that it did a good job of representing me as a person and not just a scholar.  Of course, I won't know until the last day in January if it gets me past the first round.  But I think my colleague's advice is the best I've ever received.  Hopefully it will serve me, and others, well. 

Interview

A quick note - I must proclaim my praise and thanks to God tonight for getting me through the day.  The Fulbright interview was 180º different from last year's.  The professors were courteous, they seemed interested in my positions and asked legitimate questions that I could actually answer quite easily, and they offered a few suggestions for both the personal statement and the proposal.  

I was so nervous beforehand, I thought I was going to wring my hands to death.  I barely slept for more than 5 hours last night, and I almost forewent any breakfast due to nerves.  Last year's experience was so traumatic, I seriously considered not going through with this a few times.  I know I had a number of people praying that I could remain calm and focused, and I could certainly feel the effects of those prayers.  I was unusually calm when I finally got there, I didn't shake or stumble over my words - I felt confident.  It was a radical shift from last year.  

Now I get to make some revisions and translate everything into Spanish for the final drafts.  Whoo-hoo.  Thanks for the support/prayers.  

And here's to all of my fellow Fulbright applicants.  I wish you all the best with the applications and interviews.  And remember to be happy you're not applying to Spain and so don't have to translate your proposal into a different language. :-) 

Grant Season

I think one of the most frustrating parts of academia has to be the process of applying for grants.  My first experience with grant-writing was quite positive.  I applied for two important grants in 2006 to try to fund an exploratory research trip to Madrid.  I received the first field grant through my university, which funded my airfare from the US to Madrid and back.  I also received an important grant from the Spanish Ministry of Culture - nicknamed the PCC.  It didn't cover all of my costs, since it is a matching-funds, 3-months maximum grant.  But it certainly helped to offset the living expenses a bit.  

Last fall I went through an intense grant-writing semester.  Beginning at the end of August 2007, I worked furiously to try to develop my dissertation idea into a real, workable, coherent proposal.  It was quite difficult, and took up the majority of my time.  But by mid-September I had what my committee thought was a decent proposal and so grant-writing was my next step.  I spent most of September and half of October applying for the IIE Fulbright Full Grant - first writing the proposal and personal statement, then enduring a horrendous and traumatic on-campus interview, and then having to not only make changes to the proposal/statement but also translate both into Spanish in the event my application made it to the second round.  I spent the rest of October writing a proposal for the Social Science Research Council's Mellon Fellowship.  And most of November was spent writing a proposal for the Council for Library and Information Resources' Mellon Fellowship for Original Sources research.  I spent part of January 2008 on a proposal for an AHA grant, and then in March applied for another PCC grant.  And somewhere in there I also applied for an internal Social Science research institute grant at my university, as well as funding from my department.

After all of that work, I ended up with three grants - an $800 internal research grant to fund a trip to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in July; $2000 from my department from various funds; and $4000 from the PCC.  Everything else fell through.  Which, in hindsight, is probably good, because I was nowhere near ready to take my exams last spring.  I have had next to no courses in my major field thanks to being the only modern Europeanist in the program right now, and trying to read 600 books in less than 3 months (plus grading, and grant writing) was insane.  

So here we are in the fall 2008, and everything that I had to do last year, I'm having to do again.  

1) Grant writing - I have just applied for the IIE Fulbright again, after a good deal of stress and debate about whether it was worth it.  I have my on-campus interview on Monday and am just praying it is a better and more productive experience than last year's.  I seriously considered just not applying for it, despite the fact that it is my best chance at funding for my dissertation research year.  I get to apply for the two Mellons again, and I have submitted a pre-application for a grant specifically for women scholars.  I won't find out until the end of the semester if they are going to invite me to submit a full application.  

2) Teaching - I will probably talk about this a good deal, but I am currently teaching a freshman-level course with a horrible adjunct professor, and it is causing great stress.  The adjunct gives horrible lectures that either do not tell the full stories (like not explaining the long-term explanations for the French Revolution, but simply saying it happened because France was bankrupt and the "middle class/aristocracy wanted more power") or get things blatantly wrong.  So I am struggling to find the balance between not challenging the professor's authority while still teaching my students the immense amount of material they need so that anything makes sense.  

3) Comps preparation - yeah, this has been the thing that falls by the wayside.  It doesn't help that my physical health makes the 25-hour work days that graduate school is so well known and hated for virtually impossible.  But I still feel wholly inadequate when it comes to my doctoral exams.  They should be occurring later this semester, but, again, we'll see how that goes... 

The grant writing is made even harder by the fact that I am applying for the same exact grants as last year, but since I had no feedback on where my proposal was perhaps too weak or difficult for examiners to understand, I have been making changes somewhat blindly.  I have no idea if the changes I made were the best choices, and that's a slightly frustrating place to be.  My committee seemed to be exceptionally pleased with this new incarnation of my dissertation, so I can only hope for the best.  

Here's to all of us who are spending 20 hours a week preparing grant applications, begging for consideration in a shaky economy, trying to get someone else to care about our research.  Best of luck.  Unless, of course, you are also applying to go to Spain on the IIE Fulbright. :-p