Junior students fill the front two rows of a Harrison Hall classroom, laptops opened to the same Fulbright Program website. Four senior winners, a few months removed from going through the application process themselves, sit before the hopefuls, offering guidance like worldly gurus. Up next, a faculty member who serves on one of Fulbright’s African selection committees shares how applicants are really evaluated. Ten minutes is the longest time his committee will discuss an applicant, he tells the students. You’ll need to make a good impression fast. The mood is upbeat – free pizza helps – but as submission buttons are clicked, students begin to realize what they’ve set in motion. Starting today, they are Fulbright applicants with Fulbright responsibilities. They have just committed themselves to an entirely voluntary, always rigorous and often nerve-wracking endeavor that will compete for attention with their senior coursework while appearing on no record of their time at DePauw. The next six months leading up to the October deadline will be at least as busy as any other during their college career, followed by another six months of waiting for approval or rejection – if they’re lucky enough to make it to the final round of consideration. Most will not. If all this sounds like a gamble, that’s because it is. The students have no guarantees their troubles will be rewarded with a yearlong travel grant to study, do research or teach English abroad. But they have reasons to be optimistic, too. Although the odds are seemingly stacked against them, their chances are better than most applicants face, based on recent history. DePauw’s four Fulbright
LEFT: SAMUEL T. HOLLEY-KLINE ’12 CONDUCTING ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN MEXICO.
recipients in 2012 tied for 11th among bachelor’s-degree institutions and marked the sixth appearance in the national rankings in the last seven years. More importantly, many of the applicants know someone who has won. If Katie and David can do it, why can’t I?
Starting from scratch What these students don’t know, however, is that DePauw spent most of the Fulbright Program’s history effectively tied for dead last
on campus. Not surprisingly, memories of past winners were only slightly less hazy. Although Congress established the Fulbright Program following World War II and hundreds of thousands were awarded in the decades that followed, only a handful of DePauw students could be counted among the winners. It wasn’t only Fulbright that needed more attention, either. Students were missing out on many of the major awards primarily because few were being encouraged to apply.
JUNIOR STUDENTS LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FULBRIGHT APPLICATION PROCESS FROM MARNIE MCINNES (IN GREEN SWEATER AT RIGHT).
with hundreds of other colleges and universities. The yearly winner announcements? The pizza-fueled spring registration en masse? The sense that a Fulbright grant is within a DePauw student’s grasp? All are new to DePauw. The University was able to go from a standstill to a full sprint within the span of just a few years, and not because great students suddenly started to appear in Greencastle. They’ve always been here. They just needed a little help. Until 2003, to the best of anybody’s recollection, DePauw had never had an official Fulbright Program adviser
The University tapped Professor of English Marion “Marnie” K. McInnes, then an associate dean of academic affairs, to overhaul DePauw’s scholarship advising efforts. McInnes began by working through a list of the biggestname awards in higher education and recruiting faculty members to serve as advisers for each. One was the Fulbright. Its advantages immediately stood out. Under the umbrella of its U.S. Student Program, Fulbright awards thousands of grants to American seniors and recent graduates each year, dwarfing the more prestigious, but relatively rare, Rhodes
SUMMER 2013 DEPAUW MAGAZINE 21