Ah, Fellowships

Every graduate student has to compete for fellowship funding, and we usually resent this fact. As a humanities student, I particularly feel that there are not enough fellowships, and they all ask me to do a lot of work that I'm not really all that interested in.

But on the other hand, serving as a teaching assistant to my advisor, teaching Chinese language courses did turn out to be extremely beneficial. Only by working directly with other teachers and with undergraduates did I start to think of myself as a kind of professional. I feel that this kind of labor is really worth money, because it increases the overall value of the general population. I know some people might not agree that having local Minnesotans learn foreign languages and read stories, poems and history books from other cultures increases the value of local Minnesotans, but that just means that we need to do a better job showing and explaining clearly what we humanities people mean when we talk about value.

So I guess I'm in a stage of life where I can't be mad at having to write fellowship applications all the time any more. Writing the fellowship application is good practice at "playing defense" in my field. What do I add to my school? What do I add to higher education in general? How am I good for culture? I realize I've been avoiding those sorts of questions much more often than I've been tackling them, and I want to turn this around. I just saw an advertisement for a really awesome interdisciplinary doctoral fellowship at my school, and I intend to win one. Here's the criteria I have to fulfill, with what I think are the key terms put in bold:

Selection of recipients will be based on the following criteria: the importance of the research and the clarity with which it is conveyed to the non-specialist; the potential for the student to make an unusually significant contribution to the field; the degree to which the proposed or current research manifests the student’s independence, originality, and resourcefulness; the potential for the research project to incorporate methodologies from more than one discipline; the synergy that can be created by the student and faculty member working together around the interdisciplinary topic or problem; the comparative strength of the academic record; and the clarity and coherence of the program’s presentation. Special attention will be given to the interdisciplinary nature of the current or proposed dissertation research and the willingness of the particular center or institute and its faculty to host the student during the fellowship year.

In a series of entries to come, I'll tackle each of these key terms in turn. I hopeful that I can write an honest representation of what I'm already working on that will be an unbeatable fulfillment of all the criteria.