Thinking about a Fulbright

June, 2005

I’m starting Peg’sPragueBlog to share my experiences during my Fulbright next spring. Three weeks from today, I’m off to scope out the city where I’ll have my Fulbright semester! Today, I can’t resist writing about how this amazing happening came to be. This entry is the view of the coming Fulbright from a distance of six months before it happens and 12 months after I applied to try to make it happen.

Of course I had heard about Fulbright Awards since I was in college. I’d even chatted with the Fulbright rep at my first AEJMC conference, in Phoenix, a few years ago. But spring 2004 was the first time that it seemed even remotely possible to try for one. It was the first time that I could imagine going away for a whole semester. In fact, it seemed like a pretty nifty way to start thinking about the eventual transition from our current careers to new ones...go someplace totally new; do something not totally new; see what windows the experience opens on the world; maybe, jump through one. It would be a fourth career change for each of us. Me: teacher, university administrator, professor, and the next. Russ: professor, research biologist, science administrator, and the next.

I surfed the www.cies.org website for opportunities where I didn’t need fluency in a second language, where the desired skills were in public relations, philanthropy and fund raising, or university communication management. And it had to be someplace not too scary. Tah dah! The Czech Republic. The application wanted someone interested in nonprofits and communication. Too good to be true.

I’d heard somewhere that you really needed to have a contact who would want you in the host country. I don’t know anyone in Prague.

Russ and I talked about it a lot. He’ll retire before it would start, so we could both go. Our favorite vacation trips have been to language school in Costa Rica and cooking school in Italy. We liked staying in one place and getting to know the locals and the place. A Fulbright would be that, times several months. Russ could surely find a place to work on a project with amphibians, or to start a new book. I could teach about communication for nonprofits and learn about nonprofits and communication in Prague.

I called some folks that I thought might have Prague contacts. I called Laurie at the CASE Resource Center thinking there might be a CASE member university in Prague that she’d know about. There isn’t, but….small world…she used to be a program officer at Fulbright and knew that “you have to know someone” is a myth! I called CIES. Muriel was great. I started working up my application. What’s to lose?

I mailed the application from New Hampshire, which I tell you because none of this would have happened if it weren’t for a great USPS employee in the post office there. Her computer was down and she hand calculated the postage needed to send the application. When I got home to Florida, I had a note from her saying she had undercharged me by about 50 cents, so she had put the money in herself and would appreciate it if I could reimburse her. Bless her! I would have missed the deadline if she hadn’t done that.

I had only been a professor for four years when I applied, following a 20-year career in fund raising and public relations for the University of Maryland, Mount Saint Mary’s College, and Gallaudet University. Fellow professors told me that you hardly ever get a Fulbright the first time you apply and that I was disadvantaged by my short teaching career. So I was amazed to hear in November that I’d made the first cut. It took my breath away in April when I got a “congratulations” email from Prague. Everyone was happy for me. I was happy. This is too cool!

Since then, I have made contact with the Civil Sector Studies program at Charles University…thanks to Roseanne Mirabella’s database at Seton Hall University of nonprofit academic programs worldwide…which turned out to be the program that Hana Rambouskova of the Prague Fulbright office planned to connect me with. Through Hana, I also made contact with an association of nonprofit organizations in the Czech Republic. In three weeks, I’ll go visit Prague for the first time and meet all these folks in person!