To Prajwal Ciryam, a 2006 Weinberg graduate and member of the Honors Program in Medical Education at Northwestern, the process of applying for Fulbright grant last year through the Northwestern Fellowship Office was as important as the result itself.
“Every [Northwestern Fulbright applicant] goes through a process of identifying a [research] question, struggling with how that question relates to him or her personally and figuring out not just a mission for a project but a sense of self,” said Ciryam, who won a Fulbright grant in 2009 and is now doing research at the University of Cambridge in England.
The Fellowship Office taught high-achieving students like Ciryam to treat the Fulbright application not only as a means to an end but as an experience that itself provokes growth and self-reflection.
It is this approach and the office’s dedication to the students, 2009 recipients agreed, that accounted for Northwestern’s 32 Fulbright winners this year — more than any other university in the country — and the success these students have found with the grants.
“The people in the fellowship office don’t approach this as ‘OK, how many of these can we win?’” said Ciryam. “Instead let’s identify some really passionate people. Let’s work with them to help them better understand what they want in life.”
The people who work in the Fellowship Office often work extra hours, showing up late to Professors’ offices to make sure that they get their letters of recommendation in on time.
Sometimes, the process did not go smoothly.
“The most valuable lesson I learned from the process was to learn how to take advice,” said Alex Robins, a 2008 Weinberg graduate who is now completing his Fulbright year in Cork, Ireland. “When lots of people start editing and ripping apart your personal statement, it’s hard not to take it, well, personally.”
Stephen Hill, the Associate Director of the Fellowship Office, was one of the people giving the advice. Part of his goal was to make sure students understood and expressed the qualifications that the Fulbright program expected.
Beyond having a solid proposal, he said, students need to show that they have used their college experience to prepare to do international research. Students must have had some international experience like studying abroad or studying some foreign language, and must have done independent research.
These skills have direct value in the work that Fulbright scholars do.
The Fulbright program funds student projects abroad that span all academic fields. Students can do research during their Fulbright year or complete a masters’ degree in another country. There are Fulbright grants for arts and writing, and grants for students to teach English in foreign countries.
Ciryam is researching protein misfolding, the cause of a number disorders including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s. In developing his research proposal, Ciryam looked for an opportunity to study the phenomenon practically, in a lab. He thought this would complement and complicate the research he had done at Northwestern, which was mostly computational.
He found his chance at Cambridge, where he works in a lab studying the diseases using nematodes, 959-cell worms.
Ciryam is optimistic that his idea of combining live and computational research will bear results. “There are real opportunities to collaborate and to make exciting progress by combining those different approaches,” he said.
Meanwhile, Carrie Porter, a 2009 Medill graduate is working on a master’s in journalism at the University of Ulstern, Ireland. The experience, she said, has caused her to grow in unexpected ways.
“If ever in my life you had told me I was going to be here…I never would have believed you,” said Porter. “And that’s really the beauty of what the Fulbright year offers, the chance to do those things, to have those moments, to say ‘never would I have thought I’d be here.’”