I found myself thinking about the Fulbright application process this morning.  Over the last four years, it's been kind of an obsession of mine--or it was for four years at Georgetown University where I worked in the Office of Fellowships as the Associate Director and served as the university's Fulbright Program Advisor.  I found myself thinking about the Fulbright because I realized that Friday, September 12th was the internal application due date for applications on campus.  I know this because I set the application due date a year and half ago.

Here I am on my own Fulbright fellowship, six times zones away from Washington DC and I am worrying about the application process.  I think that it's become routine for me.  This is what the fall is about when you work in an office of fellowships and scholarships--lots of questions, a fair amount of worrying, 100s of letters of recommendation to manage, large doses of disappointment (the kind of disappointment that breaks your heart) and a couple of successful candidates.

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Statistically speaking, it is pretty incredible that students actually win these fellowship for post-graduate study or research.  This is because the odds are stacked against a student actually winning a fellowship.  There are 32 Rhodes Scholarships, 40 Marshall Scholarships, 12 Mitchell Scholarships and something like 1400 Fulbright Fellowships a year.  Given the number of students graduating from college each year, it's hard to imagine that it's possible that students can actually win these scholarships but they do.

The question is: what I am I doing worrying about Georgetown's current applicants if I am happily on my own Fulbright fellowship? In part, it's because I've been working with this group of applicants for the last year helping them prepare for the application process, I am invested in them and I want them to be successful. Moreover, I've only been here for six weeks and already I've realized that this experience is about so much more than me teaching English at the First English Language High School in Sofia.  As a result, I want as many of my Georgetown students as possible to have access to similar experiences.

However, I fully recognize that the application experience is also about disappointment.  Last year, I think that over 6,000 people applied for something like 1,400 Fulbright fellowships.  Roughly this means that 1 in 6 people won grants but it also means that of these six people five did not win grants.

I know this disappointment both personally and professionally.  As a graduating senior from Wittenberg University, I made a Fulbright application to Germany to research images of women in the media.  I was recommended to country but was ultimately named an alternate.  I graduated in May unsure what I was going to do next with the cutting sense that the four years I spent studying German in college had been pretty pointless. I was unprepared for this loss and the disappointment that came with it.  I was graduating with both university honors and departmental honors; I had been editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper for a year; I was used to success.  All of this success seemed like nothing in comparison to not winning a Fulbright. Disappointment like this isn't easy to overcome.

Professionally, Ive seen the same in many of my students.  In fact, watching students manage to navigate and negotiate their own disappointment isn't much easier than when I had to deal with my own years earlier.  There isn't much that you can say or do to help ameliorate this kind of disappointment.

This kind of deep disappointment makes you question who you are, what you know and what you are doing with your life.  In many ways, the fellowship process sets you up for either great highs or great lows.  There is no in between.  This is because you can't go into the process thinking that you wont win because well you will not win.  You have to make the application believing that you can be successful--you have to believe wholeheartedly.  The result is that the hurt is doubly bad then if you are unsuccessful.

It certainly doesn't help that the major fellowships require somewhere between three and eight letters of recommendation.  So a loss often makes students feel like they've let down not only themselves but also anyone who has invested time in helping support them in their fellowship bid including faculty letter writers, members of interview committees, friends, family and even staff in the fellowship office. In reality, this is far from the case but it's hard not to imagine that you've let down everyone around you, when you feel so incredibly let down yourself.

More than once, I've had students tell me that they are sorry that they didn't win (I know you are, I am too). But in telling me this, they also seem to be apologizing to me for not winning (something that is, of course, completely unnecessary).  Yes, I want each of my students be successful in their fellowship bids but my own disappointment has taught me that it's okay not win--it just takes time to realize this especially if this is your first serious disappointment, as it was for me.

Now here I am, five years after graduating from Wittenberg University, living in Sofia and preparing to start teaching English on a Fulbright fellowship.  I didn't know when I made the first application how my life would continue to be influenced by the Fulbright.  I didn't know that the experience would drive me to help nearly 50 other people win Fulbright fellowships before I finally won my own.  I didn't know if I could bear making another application.

I didn't know how much disappointment I could actually take but what I did know was that this experience advising students and working with them on their applications motivated me to apply again and for this I am grateful. Luckily, this time around I didn't have to test my capacity for disappointment but it was there, lurking.  It would have been easier to make sense of and to deal with this time around, but it wouldn't have hurt any less.  This is, I think, one of the things that applying for competitive fellowships teaches most of us--that we have a great capacity for disappointment <em>and</em> that not winning a fellowship is by no means the end.