How to win a Fulbright Fellowship (and other tips from Imposter Syndrome-land)

It still doesn’t feel real. In about 6 weeks, my family and I will leave our new life in Raleigh, North Carolina and become global citizens for 5 months. The amount of paperwork has been overwhelming. We’ve spent more money preparing to leave than we thought possible, and feel very fortunate and privileged to be in a place where we can chose to make those kinds of decisions. The most common question I’ve gotten when people hear the news is “How did you win the fellowship?!” In an effort to be transparent and live into my values as an “open” scholar, I’ll illuminate the background and process that got me to this point.

Open access is the reason I won a Fulbright. On principle, everything I have ever written and published is available online somehow, and licensed for broad reuse wherever possible. Because I made that decision at the start of my career, and because I invest some effort in maintaining my online scholarly presence, I’ve been honored to have my work broadly discovered and accessible. My friend and colleague Sarah Stanley and I co-authored a piece on the challenges of doing digital humanities work across the humanities and library disciplines, which was published in a Special Issue of dh+lib.

Thanks to the internet, Lea Maria Ferguson discovered that piece, cited it in a report about Digital Humanities at Maastricht University, and a Google Scholar alert popped up in my inbox.

Writer, Tweeter, Trickster, Spy

Around the same time, I was promoted to Associate University Librarian, and started to set new goals for my career development, one of which was to understand what my field (digital/open librarianship) looked like beyond the United States. Early in 2017, I reached out to a mentor at Florida State, Dr. Peggy Wright-Cleveland, who also happened to be the Director of Faculty Development and a recently returned Fulbright Scholar. Peggy encouraged me to aim for the stars, pointed me to the Fulbright-Schuman award as a possibility, and over the summer of 2017, I attended weekly writing retreats hosted by the Office of Faculty Development and drafted the 4 page proposal that would change my life.

Open Scholarship Policies and Technologies: The European Research Library as a Model for Advancing…

Having made contact through Lea Maria to the University Librarian at Maastricht University, I expressed interest in doing a research project there studying open research policies (national and at the EU level), the technologies that underlie that work, and how the library supports those things. At the same time, I reached out to Christian Ulrich Lauersen at the Royal Danish Library mostly because his joy and enthusiasm on Twitter was infectious and I *needed* to find a way to infuse some of that into my next project. After several Skype calls with Christian and Henk van den Hoogen at Maastricht, I had sufficiently fooled them into believing that I was a researcher of high caliber, fully prepared and confident in my ability to accomplish this research project, and they both wrote me letters of invitation for the Fulbright-Schuman award.

I had:

• 1 large bibliography of which I hadn’t read 80% of the items
• 2 letters of invitation from folks I had emailed a few times and spoken to once
• 3 letters of reference for my ability to undertake this responsibility from Julia Zimmerman, my Dean of Libraries at Florida State, Peggy Wright-Cleveland, and Heather Joseph at SPARC, whom I had gotten to know through involvement in the U.S. open community
• 4 finely crafted (informally peer-reviewed) pages scoping out a HUGE 4–6 month research project.

On July 31st, 2017, I logged in to the Fulbright Commission’s portal, uploaded the documents, took a deep breath, and waited….

The Whole Ten Minutes

Brainstorming, Reading, OpenCon — all attempts to occupy my time while waiting to hear something.

I heard nothing from August 1st to December 12, 2017. I took a family vacation to the American southwest to celebrate 10 years of marriage. I watched my work at Florida State come to maturity. I applied for a few jobs. I flew to Berlin to attend OpenCon, another priority for gaining a global perspective on my professional community. I started to read about research technology infrastructure, and develop a research agenda around “open humanities.” Dec. 12th, I received an email informing me I had passed the U.S. review, and my application was being passed along for review at the Fulbright Commission office in Brussels. Suddenly, I was granted an interview on February 8th, 2018 for Ten. Whole. Minutes.

Nervous doesn’t come close. I was skyped in to a conference room with a bunch of professional-looking Europeans, and the whole 10 minutes was a blur. There was a lot of paper shuffling, a few questions about my proposal, a few questions about why Maastricht and Copenhagen, why me, why now, and then it was done. Almost exactly one month later an email arrived saying I was listed as an alternate, which I took as “Thanks! Maybe next time!”

I’d accepted a job offer at NCSU Libraries, and so we started to prepare to move. We signed a 12 month lease in Raleigh, and I began to prepare my work life and mindset for the position of Open Knowledge Librarian. Almost exactly one month after the alternate email, and precisely one day after signing the lease in Raleigh this arrived in my inbox: “Please note the following is an update to your initial notification sent in March. Congratulations!…”

Bright and Full

I hold in my mind a concept of who a “Fulbrighter” is. They were the extraordinarily intelligent (read: verbose) people with accents that visited my Critical Theory course in undergrad, and the Guest Lecturer in American Religious History seminar whose ideas (epistemology of religiosity) I barely understood in grad school. Twice I have submitted applications for a Fulbright Student Teaching Assistantship, and twice been rejected. But, for some reason, it stuck this time. I still feel really awkward and sort of sheepish every time I explain why we moved to Raleigh for 4 months and then will be overseas for the next 5. Eyebrows rise. “International scholarly exchange program” is a really helpful phrase for my friends and neighbors outside academia, but the subsequent “Well… that’s fancy!” is hard to follow. I am proud of my work, and I am so honored to be chosen. I just still don’t feel like the kind of person that carries that Fulbrighter label from here on out.

Have you seen this Fulbrighter?

I assume that it’ll start to feel different when I dig into the project. It will be the card that gets me in to many doors and conference rooms. It will be the key that opens the doors of next things for my career and family. And I will wholeheartedly pretend to be an intelligent person with an accent, speaking poor Dutch and Danish, trying really hard to understand my colleagues abroad whose work I respect and am there to observe. I will explore, ponder, deduce, and intuit. And after it’s all over, I will continue to believe that open scholarship will make the world a better place, and I’ll have done some small thing to make that more possible.