Requirements for Writing Fulbright Application Essays
Applicants for Fulbright Fellowships must write two essays. The first is the statement of
grant purpose (hereafter SGP); this must explain what you plan do to during your award
year. The second is a personal statement (hereafter PS); this is an intellectual biography in
narrative form, in which you tell stories and offer vignettes that will; its purpose is to give
the reader a sense of your intellectual development, to provide good reasons why you
(rather than someone else) should be selected for this award, and to paint a fuller and more
complete picture of yourself using information not available elsewhere in your application.
Before you write your two essays, you should review the tips on the Fulbright Web page:
http://us.fulbrightonline.org/applicants/application-tips. If this direct link does not work.
simply go to http://us.fulbrightonline.org; click on Applicants, then Application Tips, then
choose your kind of award.
RULE NUMBER ONE
Our most important piece of advice is this: “Show, don’t tell.” In other words, avoid
making general claims about yourself I’m enthusiastic, I’m interested in foreign cultures,
I’m a great teacher and instead, write about those aspects of your life that have led to
these things, or that demonstrate these things. Saying that you are interested in cross-
cultural issues, for example, won’t necessarily convince the Committee, since it’s the kind of
thing that’s easy to say (and that everyone is likely to say, because they know it’s important
for getting a Fulbright). On the other hand, if you tell a story about a time in your life when
you were thrown into a cross-cultural situation, and then go on to describe how you
handled it, you’ll demonstrate your abilities in this area in a way that is particular to you.
This not only provides more solid evidence than simply announcing your interests and
abilities; it may also the Committee something by which they might remember you (and
thereby differentiate you from the large number of other applicants in their stacks).
This means, by the way, that you should not write sentences that merely express your
“interest in” or “fascination by” or “desire to” or “admiration of” anything. These are all
good sentiments to have, of course, but they are not reasons to award you a Fulbright in
fact, everyone who applies to this program will have these things. Instead, you should tell a
story about how your interest in something developed, or offer a narrative description of
yourself becoming fascinated with a particular idea or country or language, or provide
enough of a description of some particular person, place, or thing to demonstrate your
admiration. Do not follow your story by saying something along the lines of “This shows
my significant interest in … or “that I am fascinated by…”; if this fact doesn’t come out in the
telling of the story, then you haven’t told it well enough. Your admiration, interest,
fascination, passion, enthusiasm, and should come out in your telling of the tale.
Please attend carefully to this all-important piece of advice. If you don’t, you’ll get a lot of
drafts back from us on which we will have written, READ RULE NUMBER ONE.”
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THE REST OF THE GENERAL RULES (GR)
GR 2. Learn about your country. Do enough research that you can demonstrate that you
understand the cultural and professional challenges of living and there. You cannot say “I
don’t yet know much about [your country here], but I am looking forward to learning about
it” — this simply will not do. If you want a Fulbright, take the time to learn more than
superficial details about your host country. You do not need to have been to the
country (though it can help if you have); but you do need to read about it in depth. We
require all Fulbright applicants to read a complete book about their proposed country. We
also require that they read their countrys description carefully and follow up on anything
that it requires or suggests (such as learning some of the language before you go).
GR 3. Avoid writing anything that could be said by any applicant to your program.
This is a very competitive award far more so, in fact, that getting into a college like Hope,
or even a more selective institution. On average, fewer than one out every five applicants
gets an award, and most of those who actually finish the application process tend to be
fairly well qualified already. Thus, you absolutely must find ways of differentiating yourself
from the crowd.
GR 4. Do not repeat things that are found in other places in your application. Your
readers may be reading one hundred applications; don’t annoy them by merely duplicating
information. They will already have your transcript and your list of honors and awards;
don’t mention these unless you are building a story from them.
GR 5. Avoid broad generalizations. Do not say, for example, that “cultural diversity is
very important” or that “everyone should learn a second language.” True as these may be,
they don’t help you stand out. Instead, offer an illustrative example tell a story about
how you became convinced of the importance of learning a second language, rather than
just saying that it’s a good idea to do so.
GR 6. The previous rule applies to descriptions of your own life as well. Avoid broad
generalizations about your experiences, unless you go on to explain them. You gain little
from writing, for example, “My time in Antarctica changed my life,” unless you explain how
it changed your life, and how that change is relevant to your application. Again, a story
about some aspect of your time in Antarctica would be much more useful in this context.
GR 7. Do not make explicit statements of religious witness. The Fulbright Commission
is a government agency, and cannot take religious affiliation into consideration. Your essay
is short; do not waste space including things that the Fulbright Commission is not allowed
to consider. Moreover, you may be unfortunate enough to have someone on your
committee who is biased against some particular religious perspective (or all of them) in
which case, he or she will already be concerned that you are at Hope College. Please do not
give such persons more fuel for their fire, no matter how misguided you think it may be!
GR 8. Avoid clichés and jargon of any kind. This statement came from an actual member
of a National Committee that was evaluating applications to Argentina: “If I read about the
tango, gauchos, or Borges one more time, I will lose my lunch.” In other words, don’t talk
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about the things that “everyone talks about” with regard to your country. Similarly, don’t
use stereotyping language about “the industrious Korean people” or “relaxed Spaniards.”
While these descriptions may be based on general cultural tendencies, they are not true of
everyone (of course); find a more specific, less clichéd way of talking about them.
GR 9. Get help. No one gets awarded a Fulbright without assistance. Ask for help from
your academic mentors, and take your essays to trusted friends who will be blunt with you
and give you tough, strongly-worded advice about your adherence to these rules. Make
appointments at the Klooster Center for Excellence in Writing early and often through this
process; the Writing Assistants are trained to help with fellowship application essays. Send
your draft essays to your Fulbright Program Advisors (Professors Cunningham and Gibbs)
so that you can revise your essays multiple times before they are due. In the early stages,
keep these essays in the format that is traditionally used for academic manuscripts:
double-spaced, with 1” margins all around, and saved in a Word file for easy
attachment via e-mail. Also, make sure the filename has your name in it, and indicates
which statement it contains “SGP Johnson” or similar. Please don’t become one of the
hundreds of wayward files in our inboxes labelled “Fulbright.doc” — we’ll never find it.
GR 10. Put your best foot forward. In their final form, your Fulbright essays will be
concise, beautifully crafted, and absolutely perfect with regard to grammar and mechanics.
You don’t have to start worrying about this right away, when you’re still coming up with
ideas and testing them out; still, you should keep in mind all through your writing
process that this is a highly competitive fellowship, and that good writing is crucial if the
Fulbright Commission is to take your application seriously. Particularly as your finalize
your essay (after many drafts), make sure you are writing as well as you can, and edit your
work carefully. Think back to the pickiest, most demanding teacher of writing that you
have ever had, and write in a way that will make that person happy.
PERSONAL STATEMENTS
The following section concerns the personal statement, and is therefore relevant to
all applicants, regardless of the kind of award for which you are applying:
Whether you are applying for a Study/Research Grant or for an English Teaching
Assistantship, you will be required to submit a personal statement. This is not a résumé
(nor a summary of one). It is a narrative an intellectual autobiography in narrative form.
When you write it, keep the following things in mind:
PS 1. Use this essay to talk about the development of your mind, your interests,
your ambitions, and your priorities. The details of your childhood are not usually
relevant in this essay, even though we call the essay a form of biography; it is an
intellectual autobiography, which means that it needs to focus on the development
of your way of thinking about the world.
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PS 2. We strongly advise you to talk about people, books, experiences, and ideas
that have shaped your interests, especially as they are related to your proposal.
Remember that the Selection Committee will be composed of people with Ph.D.’s
who have devoted their lives to education; they will not be enthusiastic about a
statement that never mentions a book, a course, a teacher, or an important idea.
PS 3. Remember that the Fulbright Commission will not be able to ask you follow-
up questions, so you must explain yourself fully in your essay. Consider carefully
the details you choose to include. When a Committee member has read your
personal statement, that person should feel something akin to having sat down and
talked with you for ten minutes or so. In other words, your essay needs to paint a
picture of you as a person, particularly with regard to the way you think and act in
the world.
THE STATEMENT OF GRANT PURPOSE FOR ETA APPLICANTS
ETA 1. Explain why you want to undertake an ETA opportunity. In some sense, this is
what your essay as a whole should do; it should give the Committee reasons to send you
abroad for a year to teach English.
ETA 2. Explain why you are applying to this specific country. This is urgently
important, and is a point at which many writers have difficulty. If you have already been to
the country or if you have an ongoing academic connection to it (because of your major, for
example), then you will have a great deal to say here. If you picked your country out of a
hat, then you will need to have heeded RULE #2 above in order to have adequate material
to answer this point. Don’t try to write your essay without this knowledge. Again, stories
about how you got interested in your country are always more successful than mere
declarations of general fascination (no matter how enthusiastically worded).
ETA 3. Describe your specific qualifications, training, experiences, and anything else
that you will bring to the classroom that will enrich the learning experience of English
language learners in your host country. You don’t need to be an education major, but you
should be able to tell the story of one or two experiences that you had which make it clear
that you could take on this kind of work. Tutoring experience is often cited here, but don’t
overlook other teaching-like experiences that you may have had that would prepare you
for this: coaching, camp-counseling, and even small-group work in your own classes might
be relevant. Again, don’t just say you did it —tell a story about it.
ETA 4. Offer a few specific ideas about how you might engage with students and help
them to learn English. Again, if you don’t bring a background in education, note the kinds of
experiences mentioned in the previous item for ideas about how you might generate these
Note: this section is only for those applying for an English Teaching Assistant (ETA)
award. If you are applying for a research/study award (also known as an Academic
grant or a Fulbright Full Grant), skip this section and go on to the next one.
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examples. To the extent possible, these ideas should be specific to your country, and
demonstrate that you understand the kinds of challenges faced by English Language
Learners whose mother tongue is the language of the country to which you are applying.
ETA 5. Explain how you expect to benefit from the assignment. Note well: this should
not be primarily about how a Fulbright will advance your career, get you a better job, or
provide a great springboard for graduate school. It will, in fact, probably do all these
things! Nevertheless, this in itself is not a reason for the National Screening Committee to
consider spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to send you abroad for a year. You
should mention your future plans, but the accent should be on how your Fulbright year will
make you a better, more internationally-aware, more culturally-competent person as you
pursue these plans. Describe what you hope to learn from your Fulbright experience.
ETA 6. Describe your plans for civic engagement outside the classroom. This is a very
important part of the Fulbright experience, particular for the ETA awards. Teaching
assignments are part-time, and the Fulbright Commission will want to know how you will
spend the rest of your time. More specifically, they will want to know that you are going to
go out and get involved with people from your host country, and not just stay in your room
and Skype with your friends. You should build on your own interests and abilities, and
then do some research about how being involved in these things would differ in your host
country than they do here. Explain how you’ll find your points of engagement and what
you hope to do. Keep all this in the conditional/subjunctive mode, because of course you
can’t be sure that you’ll be placed in a location that will have exactly what you need (an
orchestra you want to join, a social services agency where you want to volunteer, a soccer
club okay, never mind, everyplace has a soccer club, except for some cities in the United
States . . . . :). Many people try to focus on what they’d do at their school (start an after-
school club or whatever), but we generally advise against this; the Committee knows that
you’ll get pulled in to do a million things at your school, and they’re more interested in how
you’ll make cultural connections beyond that environment.
ETA 7. Do not make your Statement of Grant Purpose location-specific within the
host country, unless specifically requested to do so in the country summary. ETAs will be
placed by the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. embassy in the host country; nothing
addressed in your statement should be location-specific, since you will not know where
you will be based and what particular resources will be available.
ETA 8. Make sure you identify what you plan to do (which will be: teach English in your
country) early in your statement of grant purpose. Think of this as the “thesis statement”
of your essay. It might be part of the first sentence (if it’s a well-crafted first sentence), or
perhaps the last sentence in your first paragraph (which would come as a logical
culmination of the claims in your first few sentences). The Fulbright Commission should
not have to search for an explanation of what you want to do.
ETA 9. Remember that you applying to teach English. This means that general rules 9 and
10 (in the previous section) are especially important for your application. Your writing
ability will be, in every sense, an important demonstration of your qualifications. Your
knowledge of English should be displayed to your best possible advantage.
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ETA 10. Some countries provide more specific guidance about proposals for non-teaching
projects by ETA awardees. Some countries suggest that your project may include study
and/or research relevant to the host country, specific volunteer activities, or a combination
of these. Read your country description carefully to see whether, in your case, this is
a requirement; if so, it will have a section marked “Supplemental Project” (or words to
that effect). If you are writing a proposal that includes an out-of-class project, be sure to
include the following things:
An explanation of why your project is appropriate for your country;
A discussion of the skills and talents you bring to the project;
An explanation of the way the project fits into your educational or career plan;
An explanation of the ways in which the project contributes to the Fulbright goal
of intercultural understanding and engagement with the host culture.
THE STATEMENT OF GRANT PURPOSE FOR RESEARCH/ STUDY CANDIDATES
RS 1. Develop an intellectually-compelling and feasible project or justification for
pursuing a graduate degree program. This is the most important factor in presenting a
successful application. The first step is to familiarize yourself with the country summary for
the program to which you are applying. You should ensure that your Statement of Grant
Purpose fits the program guidelines for the host country. There are slightly different
expectations for research grants (when you propose a specific project) and study grants
(when you pursue a program of coursework); see the website for more details on this
distinction, and make sure you know which one(s) are available for your country. When
you write about your plans, make sure you identify your project or your course of study
very clearly, and that you do so early in your statement of grant purpose; the Fulbright
Commission should not have to search for an explanation of what you want to do.
RS 2. Be as specific as you can when you describe your project. You should spend
some time thinking hard about what you want to do, and your thoughtfulness should be
evident in your statement of grant purpose. It should avoid discipline-specific jargon, and
not be more technical than necessary; however, keep in mind that all your readers will be
Ph.D.’s and will usually have enough broad general knowledge to understand your field at a
general level. They will want applicants to get to the point about the “who, what, when,
where, why and how” of the project. The tone should be serious and scholarly, but not
overly recondite.
RS 3. Identify a scholar or scholars with whom you would like to work. As part of your
preparation for applying for this scholarship, you will (in most cases) need to obtain a
Letter of Affiliation from an institution of higher education in your host country. Ask your
Note: this section is only for those applying for a research/study award (also known
as an Academic grant or a Fulbright Full Grant); it does not apply to applicants for
the English Teaching Assistantship. (See the section above for ETAs.)
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mentors (in your field of research) here at Hope for help identifying potential contacts. (For
a few countries, you are instructed NOT to do this. Read the Fulbright materials for your
chosen country carefully.) If you do need a letter of affiliation and most of these awards
do in fact require one start the process of contacting potential host scholars right away.
Once you have established that a scholar is willing to host you, you will need to ask that
person to provide a letter, on university letterhead, indicating that you are welcome as a
student or as a researcher. Keep this letter safe, and keep track of all e-mail and other
correspondence with potential scholars so that you can return to this material if need be.
RS 4. Explain how you will make use of the host institution. For most countries, the
Fulbright Commission expects that you will do work within the host institution, and will
probably attend university lectures at least part-time. Use your proposal to explain what
you would like to study. Use this opportunity to fill in gaps in your education, or to
develop your interests in a way related to your research project. Be sure to read the details
about your country on the website. To the extent appropriate for your country, include
answers to the following questions: What effect will the culture and politics of the host
country have on the work? Will the resources of the host country support the project? Are
there any possible feasibility concerns that the project could provoke?
RS 5. Talk about the significance of the project you have proposed. Why is it
important? What will your work contribute? Don’t be overly grandiose in your claims
here, but on the other hand, this is no time to be timid. You are applying to go abroad and
to undertake a year-long research project, so it should have real scholarly outcomes of
some sort.
RS 6. Explain your research methodology and your goals. Do not ignore this
requirement. It is important that you demonstrate that you understand how you will
conduct your research, and what you expect to accomplish. In the process of doing so, you
will also be demonstrating that you have an adequate academic background for this kind of
work. Your methodology section should also contain a timeline; you will need to make it
clear that you can complete your project within the time period of the grant (usually one
academic year).
RS 7. Include academic citations, usually in footnotes. While the Fulbright Commission
does not expect a bibliography with your proposal, you need to discuss the scholars and
written texts that have influenced your ideas and your proposal. You need to be able to
show that you are a serious scholar of the subject area, so think hard about what it means
to demonstrate that in your field. Think about the many books and journals you’ve read
that are specific to your field, and write in a way that demonstrates that you can (at least
potentially) swim with the big fish!
RS 8. Indicate what contribution your project will make to cross-cultural interaction
and mutual understanding. This section needs to say more than simply it’s important to
work with people from other countries, or words to that effect. Exactly how will your
project contribute to mutual understanding and cross-cultural interaction? What will be
possible in your envisioned collaboration with a scholar from another country, which
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would not be possible if you stayed in the United States and conducted your research or
study program here?
RS 9. Demonstrate that you have sufficient language skills for the project being
proposed, for accomplishing the basic purposes of the Fulbright Program. If you do not
have any knowledge of the host country’s language, what other means have you devised to
accomplish these goals? You should consider that, even if a country indicates that English
will be sufficient for carrying out the proposed project, for purposes of Community
Engagement, at least a basic level of language skill should be obtained prior to leaving the
United States for the host country.
RS 10. Research projects require funding. Remember that the Fulbright Commission
generally does not fund independent research expenses. If you expect to have research
expenses besides your housing, travel, cost-of-living stipend, and health insurance, you will
need to address your ability to pay these expenses. Most research applicants eliminate this
problem by finding an affiliation with an existing research project in the host country.
RS 11. Check that you have covered all the bases. Here are two checklists for
research/study candidates one or the other will apply to you:
For applicants proposing research projects:
With whom do you propose to work, and what do you propose to do?
What is important, significant, or innovative about the project?
What are the specific research goals and methodologies?
What contribution will the project make toward the Fulbright goal of promoting
cultural exchange and mutual understanding?
When will you carry out the project? Include a rough timeline.
Where do you propose to conduct your work, and why was this location chosen?
Why do you want to undertake this project?
Why does the project have to be conducted in the country of application?
How will your project help further your academic or professional development?
How will you engage with the host country? Give specific ideas for civic engagement.
What are your qualifications for carrying out this project?
For applicants proposing to enroll in graduate degree programs:
Why do you want to pursue the proposed program in this particular country?
What are your reasons for selecting a particular institution?
Do you have the requisite field-specific background for the proposed program?
How will you gain a better understanding of the people and cultures of this country?
Demonstrate your commitment through volunteer and extra-curricular plans.
Do you have sufficient language skills to successfully complete the program?
Do you have the flexibility and dynamism necessary for active involvement in the
host country?
Revised September 21, 2015