My Fulbright Year in Taiwan

I made a day trip to Taipei today to read applications from Taiwanese graduate students who have applied for a Fulbright grant to pursue a PhD in America. Several of us Fulbrighters gave up our afternoon to read the application materials in the foundation’s office in Taipei. The foundation staff divided us into categories that roughly matched our academic areas. My pile of applications was for fields such as literature, music, anthropology, and education (and one linguistics applicant – hooray!). Even only a portion of the applications still left me with about 20 to read. I’m not exaggerating when I write that the pile of application materials was about 12 inches tall. A lot of it was transcripts and transmittal forms, but there was still a substantial amount of material that needed to be read.

After a few hours of reading Taiwanese English, my brain was pretty mushy. We managed to rank the applicants and recommend a list of people to the foundation. The next step is to invite the applicants who passed this initial screening for a face-to-face interview. I imagine that will be very stressful for the poor grad students, but it will give them a taste of what a dissertation defense is like. Who knows, maybe it will toughen them up.