Hence the establishment of NAFA—National Association of Fellowships Advisors. We, the founding board, met last spring in Chicago, and we believe there is much to be gained from a national dialogue over our professional activities.

We hope you like what you see in this, our first newsletter offering, and that what you see here further encourages you to remember us and join us as we begin to organize more extensively. During the last year, there have been well-attended, foundation-sponsored conferences nationwide, dealing with everything from the nuts-and-bolts of a scholarship effort to the complexity of an applicant's psyche as he/she prepares for competition. We've noted the explosion of scholarship opportunities beyond the Truman/Rhodes/Marshall "big three," and the rise of ethical issues concerning application procedures, as administrators, regents, alumni, and the press look for ways to promote their “stories” and affirm their own efforts through successful scholarship results. On an increasing number of campuses there are offices solely devoted to such activities. It's maddening and complicated work at times, and sometimes even fun and rewarding. Through it all we should always remember that our most important assignment is giving all students a better general educational experience—whether or not they ever receive one of these rare awards. That's why we're here and why NAFA seems important.

So there's much to talk about and learn. One of the main goals of any convention will be to address needs of new advisors, since
there are so many being assigned these duties for the first time.What we need to know from you is what you'd like to hear, and especially whether you would attend our first-ever national convention next June 22-24, 2001, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In this newsletter you will find a place to respond, so please take a second to check in the appropriate place in order for us to begin planning promptly for this event. Best wishes for a great new school year.

Making the Most of Your Mocks
A challenging mock interview (or two or three) can, we know, be instrumental in helping scholarship candidates enjoy a successful interview for the real thing.  Even “softball” questions—such as the terrifyingly vague “tell us about yourself”—can throw an otherwise prepared candidate, overstuffed with factoids and sound bytes about domestic policy or national security, off-balance.  Practice helps.

Staging mock interviews for your Rhodes, Marshall and Truman candidates accomplishes several objectives:
1) Faculty have the opportunity to get to know the candidates, and assess their academic and intellectual qualifications;
2) Candidates must answer challenging questions that impel them to think “on their feet” and that invite philosophical speculation, or reflective thinking;
3) Committees gain insight into the candidates’ values, character and moral integrity;
4) Through modeling, as accurately as possible, the actual experience of a Rhodes, Marshall or Truman interview, candidates gain enough self-confidence to carry them through the actual selection interviews.

Yet candidates often lament that mock interviews failed to prepare them adequately. They express surprise that the interview seemed more like an oral exam, or that selection committee members played good cop/bad cop routines.  They’re floored by off-the-wall or random lines of questioning.

In the past six years, as a scholarships advisor, I’m made many mistakes in putting together mock interview committees, and from these mistakes I have learned that successful mock interviews  (for the candidates and you) often depend on two principal factors: obtaining the optimal committee mix, and prepping them well beforehand.

Remember that Rhodes, Marshall, and Truman committees are composed of attorneys and CEO’s, judges and bank presidents, government officials and not-for-profit leaders, with the odd academic or two thrown in.  So to help ensure that your mock interview committee will think less esoterically and more pragmatically--more like an actual committee--bring in outside help. Board of Trustee members and major donors are often thrilled to be asked to participate.  Your university’s community outreach office can put you in contact with not-for-profit leaders in your area who would volunteer a few hours each semester.  Occasionally humanities departments host visitors’ committees.  And of course, find out if any Truman, Rhodes or Marshall Scholars either teach at your college or live in the area.  While a Rhodes Scholar who serves on the state committee cannot participate in your campus Rhodes mock interview, he or she may be willing to help with the Truman, for example.

To ensure that committee members know what kinds of questions to ask, I send each person a packet of information several days before the mock interview containing completed applications (transcript included), a brief description of the scholarship and its purpose, characteristics of scholars, and a list of sample questions.  The latter I cull from the experiences of past applicants, successful and unsuccessful.  If your college is just now investing in the scholarship process, and has no institutional memory, the Rhodes state secretary may be willing to meet with you to chat about interviews in general.  The Marshall Program Officer at your regional British Consulate is usually both accessible and helpful, and of course the Truman Foundation’s web site contains a wealth of information (and the Foundation will also answer your personal emails). 

I admit to being sneaky and manipulative; I tell the committee to arrive for the mock interviews at least 10 minutes before the first scheduled interview (and I don’t tell them they’re early).  I use those few minutes to await latecomers and remind the committee of interview protocol: how to handle introductions, who will lead off and with what questions, and what the pace of the interview should be. Finally, because mock interviews are hungry and thirsty work, I provide the committee with an array of goodies to keep everyone in good humor. 

Immediately following each interview, we have the “cool down” or debriefing session.  Everyone, including the candidate, grabs some refreshment, and we discuss how certain questions could have been answered more effectively, suggest lines of inquiry the candidate could investigate, and address posture, eye contact, and grooming issues.  The videocamera can be a most effective tool, revealing, more forcefully than any critique, the importance of enunciation and brevity when responding to questions.  (Incoherent rambling is a behavior you must aggressively root out among candidates.)  A few days after the interviews, all the candidates assemble for pizza and shared humiliation. 

Each year I discover additional techniques for successful mock interviews.  I look forward to hearing tips from other advisors in future NAFA newsletters!

--Jane Curlin, Willamette University
 

Figure 1 (anonymous French artist, 1855): “Mr. Artist, I urge you to pay special attention to the wrinkles on my forehead; they have the cachet of constant worry, a clear sign of a head for business!” As a new scholarship adviser I was not unlike a portraitist, since I, too, had been hired to help clients project an exemplary identity. However, unlike the average portrait patron, my students did not know precisely what they wanted to say to their audience. And unlike a true artist, I could not decide this for them. My students and I faced other challenges as well . . . 

The Art in the Application
For everyone involved, preparing a grant application is much like fashioning a portrait. By isolating your subject’s best features, and sculpting them with care, you hope to create an ideal personality that will delight an audience. In my first year of scholarship advising, I sometimes thought about the Old Masters’ techniques for tackling this creative process. Some consulted Lavater, an eighteenth-century pseudo-scientist from Zurich, who believed that a person’s face was the map to his soul. Lavater published a hefty physiognomic dictionary with entries on the moral implications of fish lips, receding chins, and aquiline noses. It became a recipe book for artists, who by combining [x] forehead with [y] set of nostrils could create an instantly readable personality. 

I have to admit that several months into my new job I was more than a little frazzled, and these Swiss formulas looked good. Why struggle to make a lucid commentary about a twenty-year-old who has dabbled in six majors, I wondered? If I were a scholarship adviser in the colonial era, I could just jot down his silhouette, and readers would get my drift!

Other aspects of my work also reminded me of the complexities of portrait making. Like a good portraitist I wanted to start with the best possible subjects. However, finding applicants was a challenge, since I lacked faculty contacts and an understanding of how information was disseminated at my new university. I dealt with this problem by working strategically. Competition statistics for national grants were readily available and suggested partnerships with some academic departments over others. The chair of our English as a Second Language department helped me to identify an excellent candidate for a Fulbright teaching assistantship to Korea. The student won and this year we have several candidates from the same field of study. Another strategic partnership addressed the need to meet students early in their academic careers.  Our honors program director and I ran an academic leadership program for sophomores with high grade point averages. We met six times per year, usually over dinner, and discussed skills needed to win certain grants. From this pool of students we had five NSEP applicants, three of whom won, and two Goldwater candidates, who did not win, but who realized after applying that they needed more research experience. These last two students applied for and won competitive summer positions in out-of-state labs. Both were in my office the moment the fall semester began to ask about this year’s Goldwater deadlines.

Another challenge of portrait making is that the artist and client must reconcile their differing views on how to present the latter to the world. A process of negotiation also took place between my students and myself, with some key differences. I was only a guide to the final production, not the architect of it, and my students were unlike your average portrait patron. In contrast to the scheming countesses and well-heeled swells of the nineteenth century, who pre-planned their likeness down to the last accessory, my students lacked identity to a certain extent. In fact, some found having to articulate their life’s goals to be surprisingly painful. To address this issue I am starting to bring our Career Center staff into the advising process. I also am having good luck with interviewing the student’s faculty, friends, and relatives, so that when the student and I sit down to discuss what to emphasize throughout the application, we have more material with which to work. Of course, in selecting what to stress, it helps to know as much as possible about your audience. I devoted a good bit of time to assessing the mission of each major scholarship, not to mention the profiles of past winners. Attending the Marshall/Truman conference last summer was very helpful, as was sitting in on a national screening of Fulbright applications and interviewing three faculty who judge national grant competitions.*** Above all, when I had a question I asked my counterparts at other institutions, and they were unfailingly generous.

I’d be remiss not to mention the pleasures that a first year in this field can bring. Helping someone you admire to win a life-enhancing opportunity is truly a joy. I am convinced I learned as much from our Truman Scholar as she learned from me. And I am inspired by my students who didn’t win, yet found special ways to thank me for helping them to love their major. Their maturity as learners will surely keep me going as I begin my second year of trying to understand how good portraits come to be.

--Paula Warrick, Program Director, Office of Merit Awards, American University Career Center (warrick@american.edu)

***If you attend the Fulbright screenings in New York, try to go close to Christmastime. It will be easier to get a hotel room and you may find that you have the judges to yourself and extended time to ask questions.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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