The University of Arizona Alumnus / Spring 2009
Full of Light with Fulbright
by Margaret ReganJacob Chinn photos
Every year, at least a dozen University of Arizona students embark on journeys to countries all over the world to teach and do research as Fulbright Scholars.
They might be investigating, say, the high rates of blindness among children in Qatar, as Hoda Dehdashti did in 2007-2008. Or perhaps they’re checking out the impact of organic agriculture on small rice farmers in Bali, as Karyn Fox has been doing — baby Nate in tow — the last year. Or they’re analyzing Roman pottery excavated from an ancient villa in Portugal as (ahem, full disclosure here) my daughter Linda Gosner has been doing since last October.
All these Fulbrighters got a big boost from Dr. Karna Walter, the university’s director of nationally competitive scholarships. Walter’s prep program has helped students successfully compete for Fulbrights with top students around the country, and the UA is now right up there with the Ivies and other elite institutions in numbers of students winning the competitive grant.
In 2008-2009, “We tied for 21st and were tied for 8th among public institutions,” Walter exults. Twelve UA Fulbrighters sallied overseas, conducting a wide range of projects in Mexico, Indonesia, New Zealand, Portugal, South Korea, France, Nepal, and Malaysia.
The UA 12 were among some 1,500 American student Fulbrighters, both newly minted bachelor’s degree grads and grad students, who went abroad in the past year. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor had the most Fulbrighters, a whopping 31, followed by Harvard at 29 and Yale at 26. With its 12 Fulbrighters, the UA tied with the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and Washington University in St. Louis, another leading private school.
In the state school rankings, the UA came in at eight, after Michigan with its 31 winners, Berkeley (24), Wisconsin (19), Indiana University at Bloomington (17), Penn State (15), ASU (13), UCLA (13), tying with Ohio University in Athens.
“The best students here can compete with the best students anywhere,” Walter declares, modestly deflecting credit for her efforts.
But the students she’s helped nab a Fulbright are full of praise for her. Six Fulbrighters, interviewed via Email and phone, were unanimous in their praise not only for Walter, but for the program she’s set up to help them refine their applications.
“Karna was able to give individual advice on what aspects of my project idea sounded Fulbright-worthy,” my daughter Linda Gosner e-mailed from Lisbon, “and she gave me examples of winning application essays from past years both in my country (Portugal) and in my field (archaeology). The Fulbright application is complicated and very daunting, but the UA broke the steps down, gave feedback at every moment, and really made me feel like being awarded a Fulbright was an attainable thing.”
Karyn Fox, the grad student in Bali, notes that, “In many ways, the UA helped me prepare my application.” She had support from many different quarters, but adds, “Dr. Karna Walter and the Honors (College) provided support throughout the process.”
Many Fulbright candidates have wanderlust, and Walter can even help those who are already abroad.
“I was applying from Burkina Faso, while serving in the Peace Corps,” Giorgio Soutiriou writes from Mexico, where he’s on a Fulbright business grant, “and Karna was incredibly helpful in providing guidance and logistical support.”
Walter has been with the Honors College since 2000, and in her current post since 2004.
“I work with a full range of scholarships,” she says, “the Goldwater, the Udall, the Truman. The Fulbright is the broadest. It offers the most options in number of awards and in range of things people can do.
“Different universities handle it in different ways. Some just have a faculty advisor who tries to handle it.” Others have a designated person, as at the UA. “We want to be helpful. Some universities just say, ‘Submit.’ We’ll evaluate and do an interview.”
Since 1946, the U.S. Department of State has been sending Fulbright scholars abroad, where they serve as informal ambassadors for America. (Other Fulbright programs bring international students to study and teach in the U.S., and send U.S. professors abroad).
The prestigious awards, funded both by the U.S. and the receiving country, offer generous stipends and health insurance, and often help propel the winners to success in their fields. But they’re fiercely competitive, and require an elaborate application. Prospective researchers must write a detailed research proposal and find mentors or institutions in their chosen country. All candidates have to get multiple letters of recommendations, and write up a biographical sketch.
Walter gets the ball rolling in the spring with an elective one-credit class called the scholarship preparation process.
“We do interviews, grant-writing. Give them a deadline to submit an essay. Students refine their ideas.”
Marianne Go, who taught English in a boarding school in Indonesia in 2007-2008, was such a go-getter she took the class her freshman year, “to see what was out there,” she says.
Fulbright applications are due in the fall, and early in the semester, Walter stages a series of informational meetings. Even more importantly, she sets the deadline for the intimidating application artificially early, a month before it has to be sent on to the national Fulbright committee. In the interim, a group of professors review each student’s application and conduct an interview with each applicant.
“The interviewers gave me feedback regarding my application, which was very helpful,” writes Dehdashti, who conducted the public-health research project in Qatar. “Overall the process was very organized.”
Adds Gosner, “The interview was extremely helpful: it functioned more as a review of the application and a way to get suggestions for improvement.”
Students have a week or two to make revisions, and then they’re sent off to be evaluated first by a national Fulbright panel in the U.S., and then by a similar committee in their chosen country abroad.
Walter tries to get as many UA students to apply as possible. Housed in the Honors College, she has a “captive audience” of high-achieving students, but she also does outreach university-wide “to identify top students outside the Honors College.” Each year, about 40 UA students decide to take the plunge. Last year’s applicant pool of 42 originally yielded 14 winners.
Though the program is idealistic, it’s sometimes tarnished by politics. A grad student in Near Eastern studies was notified last spring that he’d won a Fulbright for Egypt, but the next week he got a message that the “Egyptian government wouldn’t approve it.” Another student who’d applied to Kenya assumed that unrest would derail her Fulbright and made other plans. In the end the Fulbright came through but she was committed elsewhere and couldn’t accept it.
For the upcoming school year, the UA has 20 finalists. Four already received the good news that they’ve won the prize, but as of press time, the other 16 were still biting their fingernails. And they weren’t the only ones.
“We are waiting for most of the others still!” Walter exclaims. “This waiting is tough on them … and on me!”
Portraits of UA Fulbright Scholars
Hoda Dehdashti, Fulbright Fellow 2007-2008, Qatar
In Qatar, a small Persian Gulf nation, rates of congenital eye disease are high. Hoda Dehdashti conducted a public-health project looking at government-sponsored programs aimed at alleviating visual impairment among children, she reports.
“I worked with the College of Education at Qatar University and the Al-Noor Institute for the Visually Impaired. I was very pleased by my experience. I became conversational in Arabic and was able to conduct research in a field I am passionate about: public health. I met great friends…It was a fabulous experience for me, an American, to build bridges with the Qatari people and conduct cross-cultural exchange. Last, but not least, I was able to travel to Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, something I never imagined doing at the age of 21 and 22.”
The Fulbright has helped her progress toward her goal of becoming a doctor. This fall she’ll begin studies at the UA College of Medicine.
Susan Meyers, Fulbright Fellow, 2007-2008, Mexico
Susan Meyers earned a Ph.D. in rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of English at the UA in May. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Seattle University in 1999, and a M.F.A. at the University of Minnesota in 2004.
Meyers lived mostly in a rural community in Michoacan, a Mexican state that traditionally sends many migrants to the U.S. The children of those immigrants end up in American classrooms, and Meyers wanted to learn better ways to teach them.
“My project was an ethnographic study to look at the backgrounds of students from Mexico, their culture and education, to learn about reading and writing in Mexico.” She learned that working families are often “resistant to academics, but they’re savvy” about the skills they want their children to learn. “They want nuts-and-bolts reading and writing ‘so you don’t get tricked later in life.’”
Thanks to a U.S. friend with connections in the village, Meyers was able to do her interviews and observations with ease. She completed her doctorate within a year of her return, and in the fall will begin teaching at Oregon State in Corvallis as a tenure-track professor.
“Abroad you learn so much. I really want to influence classroom practice. Having the Fulbright was a huge help. These programs are life-changing.”
Marianne Go, Fulbright Fellow 2007-2008, Indonesia
Marianne Go earned a double degree at the UA in 2007, a B.S. in molecular and cellular biology and a B.A. in English and creative writing “on the five-year plan.”
In Indonesia, “I taught at an Islamic boarding school, both genders,” Go reports by phone from her home in Maricopa County, Ariz. “I lived in a little house in a teachers’ compound. The students had tremendous energy. They don’t have a lot of native speakers teaching English conversation.
“It was a good year, but it wasn’t without its ups and downs. First there was a honeymoon period, then the phase where I felt like a fish out of water.” But she learned to speak the language and learned “to deal with uncertainty gracefully.”
Go has been accepted at three medical schools for the fall; as of press time, she was leaning toward the UA’s Phoenix campus. Her Fulbright year will help her be a better doctor, she believes. “Teaching seems disparate from medicine, but we have to pay attention, listen to patients’ stories.”
Linda Gosner, Fulbright Fellow 2008-2009, Portugal
Linda Gosner earned a B.F.A. in dance at the UA in 2007, and a B.A. with a double major in anthropology and classics the next year. She’s working at the National Museum of Archaeology in Lisbon, studying artifacts excavated from an ancient Roman villa.
“Living in Portugal has been wonderful for the most part,” Gosner e-mails. “I have enjoyed the challenges of finding a new place to live, learning a new language, and meeting people from all over the world. I have come to consider these aspects of being a Fulbrighter as valuable as the research itself.”
The local Fulbright office arranged for her to study Portuguese at the University of Lisbon and the stipend has allowed her to travel around Portugal to look at other sites. Her project hasn’t gone as smoothly as she’d hoped. She had to spend five months inventorying the collection before she could begin her own research. But she expects the Fulbright to help her get into grad school, and it’s already opened doors. “I’ve been accepted to a program this summer (at the Academy of Rome) that is normally reserved for graduate students.”
Giorgio Soutiriou, Fulbright-Garcia Robles Binational Business Grant, 2008-2009, Mexico
Giorgio Soutiriou earned a B.A. from the UA in 2005 with a double major in philosophy and economics, and a minor in political science.
“I’m in a unique program,” Soutiriou e-mails from Mexico City. “It’s intended to promote relationships and understanding between future U.S. and Mexican business and political leaders. I work 60 hours a week as an analyst for a private equity company and take M.B.A. courses” at a Mexico City branch-campus of the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, one of the “best universities in Latin America.”
“Everything is great. The workload is heavier than I anticipated, but I’ve gained some experience that would have otherwise been unavailable, especially in the present economic climate.”
In the fall, Soutiriou will enroll in an M.B.A. program at the top-ranked Wharton School of Business at the
University of Pennsylvania. (Photo of Soutiriou is unavailable.)
Karyn Fox, Fulbright Fellow 2008-2009, Bali
Karyn Fox is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology. She earned a B.A. in political science with a minor in French at the UA in 1994, and an M.S. in international agricultural development at UC Davis in 1997.
Her research on the “greener revolution” in Indonesian agriculture looks at the “impacts of the government’s Go Organic 2010 initiative on small-scale rice paddy producers — who benefits and why,” Karyn writes via e-mail from Bali. Her time overseas has been “great!” She’s gotten plenty of support from the Fulbright host agency and forged “a fruitful collaboration” with Balinese agricultural researchers. Plus, farm families “have been exceedingly gracious and accommodating.”
Karyn and her husband, Tom, brought their 10-month-old son with them in April 2008. “It’s been wonderful having Nate here with us. In the beginning when he was still avidly breastfeeding, I took him with me everywhere. Having Nate with me is often a great entry point for meeting people, from farmers to government officials.”
The Fulbright “funding is what makes my fieldwork and dissertation possible,” she says. “This in turn will contribute to the experience and insight I bring to future research endeavors.”
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