Denver and Beyond
The Denver Conference “Beyond Winning: National Competitions and the Student Experience” is now more than three months and several scholarship deadlines behind us, and we have already put much of what we learned and shared into practice. The success of the Denver conference was due in large part to the organizational wizardry of Beth Powers and her support team, including Todd Breyfogle, Lori Goodman, Ken Lavin, John Richardson, Richelle Stafne, Mary Tolar and many others who organized and facilitated various sessions. The Air Force Academy, Denver University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder served as institutional hosts and were very generous with staff support. The conference was a blur of valuable information and good cheer.
Suzanne McCray
Additional Thanks
NAFA would like to extend special thanks to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Marshall Alumni Association and the British Council for hosting a wine reception and to the Rhodes Trust for hosting a dessert buffet. We also want to thank all the foundation representatives who so ably presented information about their scholarship programs. Our warm appreciation also goes to conference speakers. John Rowett traveled from South Africa, giving up rare family time, to provide us with a stirring reminder that the Rhodes Trust is committed to being an active and responsible member of the global community, just as it asks its Scholars to be. Bob Cochran, a frequent recipient of foundation generosity, shared stories of victories that arrive in unexpected ways. Jonathan Taylor and Elliot Gerson, keynote speakers for the final dinner, celebrated the anniversaries of their scholarship programs, looking to the future from the perspective of distinguished histories.
Special Recognition
Past President Bob Graalman and Foundation Liaison Mary Tolar received special recognition at the Denver conference for their pivotal roles in creating and shaping NAFA. Founding Secretary Ann Brown was also recognized for helping make a good idea workable. Our organization has become very dependent on their advice and support. Fortunately, all three have promised to continue to serve NAFA in the coming years in a variety of capacities as the organization grows and develops. Gordon Johnson has graciously agreed to serve as Foundation Liaison as Mary Tolar embraces new job responsibilities as the Director of Campus Compact for the state of Kansas.
Publication of Proceedings
For those of you who missed the conference this year, take heart. The speakers have generously agreed to allow their remarks to be published in conference proceedings. Essays and reports generated for or presented at the conference will also be included. The University of Arkansas Press has agreed to publish the proceedings and the plan is to have it available in the spring of 2004.
The NAFA Bulletin Board
Mark Bauer has enlisted the help of Midwest New Media in order to create a new NAFA Bulletin Board, which will be in place before the end of the month. The Bulletin Board will supplement the listserv and allow for extended discussions on particular topics. The most attractive feature of the Bulletin Board is the ability to search the discussion archives without having to store a bulk of messages in a mailbox. Mark Bauer will serve as moderator, and once discussions are underway, you will receive notification on the listserv.
IRS Update
The IRS has responded to our 501 (c) (3) application and has asked that we submit a travel policy and additional budget protocols, granting us a 90-day extension. John Richardson and Steve Wainscott from the Executive Board are preparing a draft to be presented to the Executive Board for approval by the end of the month. The agent assigned to our application assures us this is typical and that if more information is required, more time will be granted.
Regional Conferences
Beth Powers and the Regional Conference committee are planning three one-day regional conferences for 2004. More information will be available shortly on the listserv. In the meantime, if you have questions or suggestions about regional conferences, contact Beth Powers at bpowers@uic.edu.
Getting Both Feet in It
An effective meeting maker program, a chaos-defying filing system, and a healthy sense of what is important are all required if a scholarship advisor is to cope with the flurry of applications that the fall brings. The first two are easy. The latter can be a challenge as we receive news (or not) of interviews and scholarship awards.
Every morning I drop my sixteen-year-old son at his high school on my way to my office. We say little in the early morning drive as we listen to his cd's. It has become a tradition that before he slides out of the car and into his day, we play Brian Adams' “18 till I Die.” My son is dreaming of 18. I am trying to remember 40, but crossing our generational and sartorial differences, we share a favorite moment in that song and together belt out “If you want to stay young, get both feet in it.”
I don't seem to be staying young, but like the idea of having both feet in it. Whether we are advisors or foundation representatives, we work with students who are energetic, involved, and passionate. Many are making differences in their communities already and some will one day shape the global community. They have both feet in it, and no matter where limited scholarship dollars may fall, that means good things for all of us.
Suzanne McCray
The Rhodes to Perdition
Mapping A Detour Around Professional Potholes
“Four!” the college president intoned his mantra reserved for me as he held up four fingers every time our paths crossed, “Four Goldwaters. I want four Goldwaters!”
Possessed as he was by this specific prize, the process involved in applying and competing for fellowships didn't occur to him. A mad scientist with a funny fellowships fetish and fixation on four. My performance was judged purely by the prizes I produced, particularly, or should I say, peculiarly in his case, the Goldwater.
After we had won his famous four, or should I say, after OUR STUDENTS HAD WON four Goldwaters, he said to me: “So do you get to keep your job?”
Nice, isn't it? This story was told to me by a fellow Fellowships Advisor. Yes, our job, as delightful as it is to advise the best and brightest students at our institutions, is at the end of the day, no matter what is said to the contrary, judged by the number of winners we bring so our colleges can brag. For good reason too: It attracts better students and faculty, and helps raise money. Can't knock that.
But we know the ultimate prize of winning is only half the prize. The other half comprises the benefits of the process to the student. So it should be if we are managing to do our jobs decently and resisting pressure to produce winners regardless of whether the process is beneficial to the applicants. It's great to win. But at what cost? This dilemma goes straight to the heart of what defines our profession of fellowships advising.
The Denver conference theme "Beyond Winning" ties to articles that have appeared in The New York Times ("Fellowship of the Rhodes") and in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Ambitious Colleges End the Ivy Lock on Prestigious Fellowships”). Both articles raised contentious issues about our profession that, like this year's conference, address the process of applying and preparing for fellowship competitions.
The conference will seek to show that not only should the end (winning) justify the means (competing), the means themselves (process) should be an end in itself. The contentious issue at stake is over some of the means we might be tempted to employ in order to satisfy college expectations, implicit or explicit, even outright demands (“count my raised fingers” – never mind “read my lips”). There's no getting away from the fact that our job performance is judged inter alia by the number of winners we produce.
Let us reflect upon the question of grooming (scouting, recruiting, mentoring, advising, coaching, prepping, rehearsing) in order to reconcile any conflicting approaches to our profession so that we can advance our common goals. Both articles sought to some degree (even to the third) to spotlight or sensationalize the lengths to which colleges can go to win, to the extent that this smacked of fellowships engineering. Our profession as a whole was tainted by some of the insinuations. Yet we are wise enough to know 'tis best simply and calmly to see what we can learn from this by the same self-searching we expect from the fellowship aspirants who come knocking at our doors. Or as one colleague put it regarding the more eager variety: panting at her door.
Let us bind together to grapple with the core issues raised – touchy, ticklish and tricky as they are – that still confront us, and indeed are the shadow image of the conference theme.
There is a point at which the end of winning no longer justifies the means, hence the need to ensure the benefits of the process are as worthy as the prize, that the means themselves justify even the pursuit of the ends. In other words, it is not so much a matter of the lengths to which some colleges go or must go to win, but rather a question of applying the acid test whether these lengths are themselves educational and beneficial to the fellowship applicants.
If not, then we might say there's a danger of traveling "The Rhodes to Perdition" should the prize mentality become an obsession riding roughshod over justifiable process. If the process itself of rewriting an essay over and over (and over) and practicing at multiple mock interviews does not benefit the student beyond winning, then the end does not justify the means. There can be a fine line between guiding a star to a self-fulfilling fellowship, and reshaping less-promising students (and their applications) into fellows.
A keen young fellowships prospect in our college's GPA top one percent asked me recently if she should give up her position on the Varsity swim team since this took up so much time that she could devote to volunteering. The rest of her spare time is spent in a lab as a research assistant to a professor. I counseled her to honor her athleticism and keep swimming. I feel morally obliged to advise students to remain true to themselves. However much I might feel tempted that she has the makings to be our first American Rhodes Scholar, I am not prepared to advise she change her life for the sole purpose of winning. Not that volunteering is necessarily better than swimming for the Rhodes, but I don't want to create fellowship winners like some test-tube baby, I want only to bring out the American Rhodes Scholar (if only I could find one!) that is already within a student.
Yes, as trite as it may sound, life is bigger than the Rhodes. The problem is The New York Times article made it sound that winning was pursued at all costs, so to speak, or at least at great cost, even when it was unclear that the cost was worth it to the students, regardless of the prize. It painted a picture of self-flagellation almost, amid a whipped-up frenzy, of bewildered losers crushed after a marathon. As Yale Fellowships Advisor Mark Bauer commented on our list-serve after the Times article appeared: “It gets a lot wrong about fellowship advising and, by extension, NAFA's mission and philosophy.”
Again, despite the article's inaccuracies, while we face prize pressure, the issue of grooming remains. The Chronicle went so far as to “expose” an unnamed college's “secret formula” for pumping out Trumans, Marshalls, Goldwaters and so on that essentially relied on an advisor micromanaging all aspects of the applications to the point of instructing applicants what to write, resulting in insincere essay self-portrayals. Call them betrayals.
At my college, I have been reciting my own mantra from my soapbox: “There are no losers in our fellowships program. All emerge winners from the enriching process.” Fortunately, my superiors see the virtue in this holistic embrace. Nevertheless, it takes a lot to beat a headline boasting major fellowship wins. It is a hallowed knighting with a glittering sword that few other single events can bestow on a college and its extended community in one swift, stark stroke to boost its pride and prestige.
See how easy it is to forget the students as we get caught up in the glory? As least as much as we use them for the fame and fortune of the college, should we ensure that their best interests come first. We can never be too vigilant about this. And we can all do with reminding about it.
The ultimate test is this: If the student does not win, and most don't, then was the process itself still profoundly worth it for the student? It will usually be found that the bigger the benefit of the process to the student, the less the disappointment experienced at not winning.
It does not serve our students for us to have such an eye on the prize that the future supersedes the present because then the greatest gift yielded by the process will be too elusive. The deepest benefit from the fellowships application and preparation process, besides obvious skills acquisition, is its potential of being an initiation into adulthood through a process of self-reflection and self-discovery that leads to a higher degree of the practical philosophical treasure that is self-knowledge.
This becomes even more important if we take seriously a more recent Chronicle article that proclaimed the fellowships system is in the business of choosing tomorrow's leaders. (For more about this, there is a session at Denver on this year's Fellowship Foundations Conference held in Italy.) If we want to place the future of our planet in wise hands, then we are duty-bound to ensure our applicants have applied the perennial dictum to “Know thyself.”
Leaders driven by impulses of which they are unaware are perilous. Leaders in whom lurk hidden motives are treacherous. It is a tragedy how some bad leaders stay in power so long to wreak so much harm and hurt so many. It is a reflection of a society for which its citizens are responsible when callous politicians masquerading behind masks of compassion end up in power.
As much as we groom, let us do our part to weed out those who do not convincingly demonstrate good character. Let us ensure we truly and thoroughly know those whom we endorse, nominate and otherwise sponsor. Let us truly take to heart “who” the foundations say they seek: those with a vision, and the talent and motivation to serve humankind in order to improve society. The globe has shrunk and with it power continues to concentrate in fewer hands. Let us ensure ours are clean, not washed. The potential to do good or harm has multiplied, especially for powerful nations.
Let us have the courage to state honestly any unavoidable character reservations we have about those whose applications we forward. Even if it means forfeiting a fellowship. We had a candidate in a competition who was marked down on the evaluation rating because of concerns about character issues involving reliability, conscientiousness, and candor, as she went about producing application materials for the various campus screening stages. An otherwise outstanding candidate, our comments about this on the foundation form may have cost her the fellowship as she was named an Alternate.
Perhaps we will each need to put fewer applicants into the pipeline, only those in our heart of hearts we believe deserve the fellowship, and will make an excellent fellow, and who genuinely stand an above-average chance of winning. The foundations are bound to force this in time with new restrictions to up the ante, for instance by raising the eligibility bar. This has already happened with the Rhodes's academic standards, and the Marshall has shifted away from the humanities. Another step to shrinking the pool might be to limit the number of “nominees” per institution, as with the Truman and Udall. Except that could limit the foundations' options in finding the very best nationally (as the Fulbright and Gates strive to achieve) if state representation is not part of their objective. Regional competition pools tend to be complex and uneven or seem less straightforward and more inscrutable. Not that regional competitions themselves put a cap on institutional participation.
As it is, the fellowship competitions are being swamped (just witness the spectacular rise in Fulbright applications last year, for instance) and may become clogged. While NAFA strives for high standards, we equally popularize more participation. We are creating more competition for ourselves even as we help each other. This is healthy but it does demand that we each raise our own standards, intrinsically, rather than concentrating overly on the outward push for the prize.
If we roll out Rhodes robots and manufacture Marshall machines, we have failed. The process must not turn students into who they are not, but rather make the inherently worthy more who they are. Then we all win the Self-Fulfillment Fellowship.
Don Andrew
Smith College
Survivor
Anonymous
At the NAFA conference in Denver, Bob Graalman joked from the podium that we ought to create a "NAFA Survivor" TV series, judging one another's personal statements and letters of recommendation, and voting people off one at a time. I laughed. I laughed a little bit too hard, perhaps. Bob's joke cut just a little too close to the bone, because I have not yet fully healed from my own application rejection. Yes, I am a proud NAFA member, but I am also a rejected "Survivor" semi-finalist.
I applied last January for the "Survivor" that filmed in summer 2003 off the coast of Panama, and is currently on the air. I had little hope of actually getting on from a statistical standpoint – after all, the "Survivor" application process makes the Rhodes competition look like a walk in the park. About 60,000 people vie for the 16 slots on each show; only 800 lucky ones even make the first cut. The original application is 10 pages long, and requires a 3-minute, videotaped "personal statement." The 800 semi-finalists fill out more paperwork, including a 15-page background check, and are individually interviewed in major cities across the US. Another cut is then made to 50 finalists, who are flown to L.A. for two weeks of interviews, after which the cast of 16 is announced.
It's hard to explain why I applied to be on "Survivor" without giving away who I am. And if I give away who I am, then there's no way I can enjoy Louisville in 2005, given the giggles I'll constantly be hearing – real or imagined – behind my back. But let me just say that I've been hooked on "Survivor" since the first one aired. Something about it appeals to my love of pop culture, my competitive nature, and my sense of travel and adventure. Suffice to say that I really wanted this.
But I wasn't applying to get on the show, I kept reminding myself. This is about the process, right? I shouldn't worry about the product...applying is about personal growth... it's about learning who you are and who you can be...it's about daring to dream, and fighting for that dream! I repeated the NAFA mantra my students have come to know verbatim – "Don't even think about winning…the people who focus on winning never do… control the parts you can control, and don't worry about the parts you can't…the true winners are those who gain no matter what the outcome…"
And, just like my students usually do, I ignored me and focused on what I wanted – a spot on "Survivor" and a chance to grasp the brass ring of success.
I was shocked, then, when I received a call from "SEG," the Survivor Entertainment Group, just three short days after they received my application. They "loved" my video (read "loved" as you can only imagine an L.A. casting agent would say it, and you'll be spot on), thought my written application had "good energy, a real positive vibe" (ditto), and wanted to interview me at my local CBS affiliate.
An interview? An interview! I can NAIL an interview! I get PAID to prepare people for interviews. At this point, I pretty much had my plane ticket booked and my summer blocked out for the filming. True to our profession, I even roped a colleague into helping me with a mock interview. I thought about what they might possibly ask me, rehearsed in front of a mirror, laid out my clothes neatly on my bed, and tried to get a good night of sleep. Oh, if only my students could see me now!
The interview itself lasted about 25 minutes. I was as nervous as any of our students would be facing Louis Blair or Elliot Gerson. Except that I was miked, on camera, and had TV lights shining in my eyes, so the pressure was cranked up an extra notch or two (note to Louis and Elliot: don't get any funny ideas). The questions were a mix of generic (Why do you want to do this? Do you think you can win? What would your strategy be? When was the last time someone made you mad?) and personal (Tell me about this experience mentioned in your application. Tell me how this other experience prepared you for "Survivor."). I had anticipated about 80% of his questions. I hit home runs – the interviewer laughed, he teared up at one point, he plumbed the depths of my soul, and took my measure. I fairly skipped out of the interview. I nailed it, just as I thought I would.
A couple of weeks later, I got the call. "We've had our final casting meetings," the SEG representative told me, pausing, "and I'm sorry, but you didn't make the last cut." My heart sank. Mental images of my rejected Rhodes, Truman, and Fulbrighters swam before my eyes…the rest of the phone call is a blur. I just didn't measure up. The tribe had spoken, and they booted me to the curb. Near the end of the conversation, we talked a little about how to improve my application for the future, but my heart wasn't really into it. Piling insult upon injury, SEG followed the phone call up with a letter – a cheap, photocopied, bulk-mailed, "Dear 'Survivor' Semi-finalist" generic monstrosity, rejecting me again.
As unfortunate as this ending was for me, after a few weeks I was really struck by how well SEG had capped off this experience. They called me. They gave me individualized feedback on my application within days of making a decision, and I was just one of 750 rejected semi-finalists. How much time, effort, and money must they have put into this rejection process? Does "Survivor" actually have a lesson to teach some of our scholarship foundations about how to treat non-selected candidates?
Like my students, I was able to eventually gain perspective. I had a great time preparing for and going to the interview. I made an application video that is really fun, and that I can show to my friends and share a good laugh over. I have an interesting story to share, and was a small part of a pop culture phenomenon. In other words, the process was worth it, dadgummit, and I can actually tell my students with all honesty and candor that my mantra is true, that applying is its own reward, and, if they don't win, that I feel their pain. Though my disappointment did not seem to be as deep as what I see in my students when they are not selected, I think I'll be a better scholarship advisor because of this experience. No matter how much you remind yourself that this is a subjective process, that it's not about you as an applicant but you in the context of the applicant pool, and that this is not a judgment of your worth as a human being, I know that dreams die hard, and it's hard to stop fantasizing about what you could have had. It's then particularly tough when you see others get what eluded you, whether those people be marooned on an island on your TV screen, or represented in smiling photos and gleaming bios on a scholarship website. Everyone has to process their experience, whether or not it ended up the way they wanted it to. For me, it took time, looking around at how great my life is despite not being on "Survivor," and writing this article.
As for "NAFA Survivor"? Graalman, you're on.
(Thank you to my NAFA friends who read, edited and commented on this piece for me. I appreciate all of your feedback and help, though you will remain nameless so that this cannot be traced back to me…you know who you are…)
Copyright © 2002 National Association of Fellowships Advisors
Site by Midwest New Media, LLC