I have started the recording. We're live. Welcome Dr. Vicki Johnson. Right, Mike. Thank you so much it's such a pleasure to be here I'm going to share my screen, I have some slides today. Thank you so much for having me be here. It's really special to speak with the Cornellians because I'm a Cornellians myself I have my red on for "Go Big Red" and it's exciting to be here 20 years after graduating from Cornell in 2001 to talk about how to launch your social impact career through fellowships. Fellowships or something that when I was an undergraduate on campus, it wasn't, actually wasn't really aware of fellowships, I sort of stumbled upon this idea of fellowships my senior year so I'll give you a little background on that and then though, I've actually used fellowships throughout my whole career which is really only been in the world of social impact but I've been able to work in fields like government, policy, academia, and now social entrepreneurship. My full name is Dr. Vicki Johnson, you're welcome to call me Vicky and I'm the Founder and Director of a social enterprise called Pro Fellow. We're the world's leading online resource for information on professional and academic fellowships and I started this organization ten years ago because early in my career I did several fellowships that I found primarily through basically deep Internet research so early in my career during my senior year at Cornell I found a brochure in the career office for the New York City Urban Fellows Program, this was a one-year fellowship in New York City government where fellows go and are able to spend one year working in a placement of their choice and you're in a cohort of twenty five fellows and there was a leadership development curriculum we did study tours to DC and the state capital and you have the opportunity to meet people that were really leading these huge New York City government agencies so the Urban Fellows Program was really a dream job for me out of undergrad and as a government major, honestly, I didn't really know how to get my foot in the door and two organizations so the New York City Urban Fellows Program was my first fellowship and foray into the world of government and social impact. I also did several other fellowships in my career so I started working in public health and emergency management through that first fellowship in addition to other permanent jobs that I had I also did the German chancellor fellowship in Germany this was a one-year paid opportunity to do with self designed project in Germany and they took people from all different fields and disciplines. I also did the Herbert scribbled in your piece fellowship in Washington DC, this was a six to nine month paid fellowship for the opportunity to work in a policy think tank in DC working on peace and security issues and so again you've got to choose your placement and it was a really extraordinary professional development experience and then after also getting my Master of Science in public health and also doing my PhD, I also did a mid-career fellowship in New Zealand called the ENS for fellowship in public policy this was for mid-career policy professionals. I was working in this field of children in disasters, working with fema and other organizations and so I went to New Zealand for seven months, this is also where I did my PhD with full funding. I also talk a lot about graduate school funding at ProFellow The crux of the story is I like to call myself a career adventure these fellowships have been really unique way for me to live, work, and travel all over the world but with the funding and infrastructure to do that, for me I always wanted to have a service-oriented career so I was really active in community service while I was just a Cornell student, I worked at on-site volunteer services my whole Cornell career and I knew that I wanted to do a service or social impact career track I just didn't know which direction to go in as an early graduate, fellowships really gave me guidance, it opened up my eyes to new opportunities. Now I'm committed to helping people like you find these fellowships and get into them so first I wanted to tell you a little bit about fellowships, but just a little background proof fellow this is what the homepage looks like at ProFellow we have a free public database of fellowships fully funded graduate programs and other types of funding awards and I'll tell you what we mean by the definition Fellowships, this is our social impact mission is to help make these funding awards more accessible and findable particularly because these awards help people do socially impactful work in a wide range of fields from creative arts to public policy to social justice, you name it even in stem and other fields. We also do articles, we have articles written and interviews with former and current fellows because we'd like to ask them about the fellowship experience and get their application tips so we have lots of articles on application tips. We also do lots of events like this like doing webinars. We're currently in the midst of a ProFellow University tour so Cornell is one of tens of universities and I'm speaking out on fellowships So thank you for joining me today as part of the Cornell community so first, How do I define Fellowships? Fellowships, a lot of people think Fellowships are this or that, we have a really broad definition for fellowships so we call them short-term funded opportunities to do something exceptional, whether or not a program has the word Fellowship in it we will bucket it in our definition of Fellowships, if number one it's Short-term so it should be time limited these are not permanent  jobs or internships there a little bit different but they usually are time limited anywhere from a couple of months to up to two years in length, a common length is a year for a Fellowship. Also funded, funding is important to us and so we only list funded opportunities meaning that they provide a stipend like a salary or some sort of grant funding so we actually don't list on ProFellow non funded or volunteer or tuition based programs, those will not go in our database so everything in our database is funded or comes at no cost to the applicant and then we say to do something exceptional for two reasons, Number one, Fellowships are really unique they usually provide you some work experience or networks that you typically can't get in a permanent job at the same level so for entry-level Fellowships a lot of them will give you really challenging and exciting work that's quite different than what you might get at an entry-level job and also all of the Fellowships have a competitive application process so I'll talk a little bit about that too these are merit-based awards they are looking for people to help address social impact challenges like I said in all fields so I'm going to talk a bit about the competitive application process as well now why would you want to apply to a Fellowship well these fellowships like I said are really unique and that they provide the funding the infrastructure and the networks to do pretty extraordinary stuff. Some fellowships can give you funding to pursue a self design project or conduct research I went to Germany on the German chancellor fellowship and I was able to compose a project I was working I was composed looking at biosecurity in Germany and I was able to be my own boss and do an autonomous project for a year I got to learn German and be part of this really incredible cohort so that was a unique fellowship for the infrastructure that it provided. A fellowship could also give you the infrastructure to gain high level work experience in your industry or even get a foot in the door whether you're new to a field or trying to change careers so the New York City Urban Fellows Program is an example of that I had a a one-year work placement in New York City government agency I was actually part of the 9/11 cohorts so we started our fellowship just before the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11 and we weren't placed in our placements yet I actually chose to work in the New York City Office of Emergency Management in that year following 9/11, so again a really incredible foot in the door open my eyes to a totally new career track in service in the field of emergency management. There's also tons of international fellowships I love international fellowships they are incredible opportunities especially to do at early career or even mid career so this could give you the funding the infrastructure and visas and cohort needed to have a successful experience abroad so you could work or potentially study. You can also get funding for graduate school through fellowships there's lots of masters and doctoral fellowships and programs providing full funding. In all cases you're going to broaden your professional network through fellowships and as somebody now 20 years post-graduation, I can tell you that your professional network is the most valuable thing to your career progression and to new jobs and leadership experiences as you move through your career so cultivating your professional network is something you want to do from the early first days of your first jobs and fellowships really give you an opportunity not just to connect with leaders in your field but even your peers or other emerging leaders your peer network that you build in a fellowship is also extremely valuable. Now for fellowships a lot of people think fellowships are only academic or postdocs there's a wide range of fellowships and two big buckets so professional fellowships are those fellowships that give you funding or a stipend for a full-time work placement or project funding so there's lots of different types of project funding then there's also Academic Fellowships These are the fellowships that fund research, graduate students and post-doctoral research or projects for experienced scholars so that's what I would call an Academic Fellowship then there's also some fellowships that straddle both worlds they'll give you a little bit of each. Now when applying for a fellowship the application process is much more like applying to graduate school than applying to a job and this is true also for the professional fellowships so even for professional fellowships they will have a application that will require Resume or academic CV, a personal statement and so this could be a one to two-page essay about your goals, your motivations, what you wanna do or sometimes this is in short essays or short answer responses they usually require two to three recommendation letters or references so you want to be prepared with those. Some fellowships will ask that you create a project or research proposal so I had to do that from my Germany fellowship and for my New Zealand fellowship, I had to come up with a project that I would pitch in some cases you may need to be in contact with a host institution this can be more common for international fellowships so basically during the application you have to go out and find a host institution that will be willing to host you if you get the fellowship so again I had to do that from both my Germany fellowship and my New Zealand fellowship and this can be the case for some domestic fellowships and in all cases I had to go through an individual panel and or group interview for the finalist round so there's an interview process and those cases and also like grad school the deadlines for these awards will be well far in advance of when the program or funding begins, right now we're in fellowship application season as I call it a lot of the deadlines for programs and positions and awards that begin next summer or fall are happening now between now and January, so there's a little bit so unlike a permanent job that you're applying and you'd get it and start right away this is quite different now is a good time to look for fellowships and start to put together the application components for deadlines happening as early as now, December, January, February, maybe even up until March, If you're looking for programs beginning next summer or next fall now I'm gonna give you a little demo of the profiler database we've worked very hard to try to find, categorize, and make accessible these incredible opportunities so I'm going to hop over to the database to show you this so at ProFellow.com, if you go to our homepage it will prompt you It'll say there's a big "Get Started" button or you can sign up this is the sign-up to use our free database and so when you sign up you create a profile it'll ask you to fill out a couple of fields like education level, disciplines what you're looking for and just so you know this information is only for use in our database or to send you  opportunities of interests but we do not sell any personal information to third parties of any kind not even fellowship organizations so unlike a lot of other scholarships platforms we do not sell information as a revenue model we just collect this information So you can do this inside the database profile filters so if you put in what you're looking for in your disciplines you can just click this little button and it'll go ahead and just filter the database for you I will say profile filters can be really helpful but I want to show you how to use the filters from without them just so you can see what the different types of filters will provide you. First of all we have 2,420 programs listed in this database so these are not individual awards these are actually programs so this is representing thousands and thousands and thousands of individual fellowship opportunities and if you want to the first filter to use is the type of fellowship so first on the academic side there are fellowships at the undergraduate, masters and doctoral level so an undergraduate masters or doctoral Fellowship these are funding awards specifically for enrolled students and these are typically funded by non-profits, philanthropic organizations, government agencies, corporations, research institutions, you name it, and a lot of these fellowships exist because they want people to do research and untapped areas or addressed certain social challenges or really they want to create more diversity in certain fields, maybe get more women in stem or have more underrepresented groups in foreign service so if you're an undergraduate student first, I would encourage you to check out the Undergraduate Fellowships some of these will fund undergraduate research, some provide funding for professional development or internships there's lots of different things here so check these out. A lot of them are for undergraduate research so if you're doing a senior thesis or doing research as part of a project or organization I would check those out Likewise if you're a master's student already enrolled checkout masters fellowships Likewise, it could give you funding for a master's thesis, professional development other special programming and of course a doctoral fellowships a lot of these are for PhD students so limited funding for people in professional doctorates but if you're in a research-based doctorate or law school or others you'll find some fellowships in here that might be applicable to your program also, if you're a student currently you might want to check out summer fellowships these are funded summer opportunities that are like almost like high-level internships they might provide the funding to work in a certain field some of them do lead to job opportunities I would also recommend that you check out summer fellowships. Again, make sure you look now for summer fellowships especially if you're looking for something for summer 2023, the deadlines are gonna be happening between now up to January, February for the summer opportunities so you don't want to wait too late to start looking at these and just as an example the Guy Halgren Diversity Fellowship, $35,000 to three talented law students so that's a summer fellowship there's an MBA, HBCU Fellowship for HBCU graduates there's a venture capital program, IMP, this is a special fellowship board non-profit practice people who are looking to get non-profit experience and so forth some are about specific topics some are about specific types of students I mean I would encourage I'll show you how to narrow this down a little bit more so you can find what you're looking for, also in this database we have fully funded PhD programs and fully funded masters programs so early in my career I did not know about fully funded graduate programs, I took out student loans for my Master's but later then I found out I've got full funding for my PhD, discovered the world of fully funded programs. I won't go too much into this but if you're thinking about going to graduate school or getting another graduate degree or a PhD definitely check out these programs these are programs that offer full funding at acceptance meaning a stipend and tuition waiver for the duration of the studies I do a lot of events on this if you want to learn more about that you can follow up with me. Now the final one which I kinda highlight today are the professional fellowships we currently have 674 professional fellowship programs in the database and again these can function like full-time work placements they are in all different disciplines some of them are project funding, most of them are full-time but there is some part-time opportunities that can be in different fields so some of these can help you get a foot in the door some of them can help you If you are experienced in a certain field it can give you an opportunity for leadership development or advancement some people even use them to change careers or let's say you've been working in the corporate world now you want to go into the non-profit world, a fellowship may be a good avenue to do that. I'm going to use professional fellowships as an example to narrow it down now you might want to narrow it down a little bit more by disciplines so we have really broad disciplines in this filter, education, liberal arts, medicine, health sciences, whatever your interest area is whether it's what you studied or even just what you're interested to go into that's the disciplines that you want to use so let's say you wanted to look at fellowships in journalism that would actually you'd think, okay what discipline does that fall under that would fall under communications, then up here we also have a keyword search, you can use the keyword search for words like journalism, you can also use other subjects like I want to work in public health, I want to do social justice work, I want to do public interests law there's lots of keywords like this so depending on what you are interested in you can do that there's also stem fields in here if you've worked in stem, there's lots of education-related fellowships if you want to go into a fellowship to go into teaching there's lots of opportunities there and also there's fellowships in the creative arts, technology, international affairs so you would use this discipline bar to further narrow down and then also use the keyword search now I always tell people don't use the keyword search to aggressively or get too narrow with the keywords because a lot of fellowships are multi-disciplinary so you might be saying, well I want to specifically find public health fellowships there are definitely fellowships in here that are specific to the field of public health but there's also a broader public policy fellowships or social equity fellowships or others that through which a public health-related project replacement could happen so just as an example if you put in public health it will only show a result here if public health is in the title in the very brief description or an a tag so again I would say if you're interested in public health I would just look at Medicine Health Sciences there's 128 results but we've made this really skimmable these are really short descriptions and if you want it to look a little more closely at these opportunities you want to click the link here this will give you a little more information but where you really want to find the full information is at the website which is at that go to fellowship button, we just added a bunch of fellowships for veterans we do this every Veterans day we go in and see are there any new fellowships so this is one of the George W Bush Presidential Center so if you are a veteran and you wanted to look more closely at this program click that link also if you want to bookmark this program to your profile of accounts just do add to favorites and then if you're like well where is that now you can click the show favorites here everything you bookmarked will be listed there and then to get out of that, go there. Let me just show you a couple of more filters and then I'll take any questions you have about I'm looking for this or that so thinking ahead what kind of fellowship you'd be looking for a program location if you're looking for something in the U.S. he would choose North America, you can also narrow it down by states Lot of people look for fellowships in DC, New York, you could look at Boston, you can look at California, you could not do more than one keyword at once California, but again I wouldn't go too narrow with location because some of these are in multiple locations and it may or may not have words like New York or D.C. or other things on it so if you want to look for U.S. fellowships do that if you're interested to look into international fellowships just look at the continents of interest like Europe, It just include everything except South America if you're open to anything or narrow it down but let's say you want to do a fellowship in Germany, you can use this to find Germany, and I'm sorry, I have this program like there should be more there's a lot in Germany. Germany is like a mecca of fellowships, but you can just use the keyword search for specific countries if you're looking for that or if you want to learn a language or get language immersion try that as well so I'm going to clear these as well, Citizenship if you're a U.S. citizen it's a good idea to put in the United States that'll take out of your list ones that are not open to U.S. citizens were likewise if you're only a non-U.S. citizen you can put in your citizenship but I will say if you're an international student who's studying at Cornell in the U.S. I would still encourage you to put in the United States because some of these are not specific to citizenship they're more specific to do you have a visa to work or study here so I would encourage you if you are a qualified international students in the United States or if you're a professional and have a work authorization of any kind I would just for the purpose of this database just put United States as your citizenship because it's not sophisticated and detailed enough to rule out what's work authorization versus citizenship as a requirement. We also have big buckets of work experience I will say a lot of fellowships don't have specific requirements around work experience or age, a couple do but I would say that there are fellowships that are truly geared toward recent graduates, early career candidates, while other fellowships are more geared toward experienced professionals, people with five or ten years of work experience or more mid-career, late career experienced scholars so you want to hone in on the ones that are most aligned with where you are in your career so if you are a senior you might want to just narrow it down, look at the ones open to less than five years if your mid career you might want to look at five to ten or ten plus to narrow out those early recent graduate awards it's not perfect I would still recommend that you go to the fellowship sight to see what's the general age or work experience range of who they're selecting to get a sense if you're a good fit for the program. Now for keywords, I still love to use there's lots of keywords you can use let's say mid career you could use mid-career is a keyword we use often you can find specific subdisciplines and seeing what we'll find things in stem or like I said social justice there's also some part-time fellowships listed so you can use the word part-time or the dash there's even some virtual programs but I'm going to hop over to the chat because I'm curious what fields people are in or interested in and maybe I could give you some ideas of things you should be looking at so let me hop over if you want to put in the chat, Oh, Sarah had a good question If we're already in our first year of PhDs is it to late to apply for the fully funded PHD fellowships? well actually Sarah, if you're already enrolled in a PhD program the fully funded PhDs are for people who are not yet enrolled so these are programs that you would apply to unless you were maybe going to transfer but that would not be the same but you would want to look at doctoral fellowships in your field so these could potentially be applied to your current doctoral program. I do like to catch people before they go to graduate school because I always recommend that you not pay for a PhD there's lots of fully funded PhD programs but like me even though I went to Cornell I did not know about fully funded programs until later in my career so I'm trying to make it my mission to help people find these programs let's see someone asked is it okay to clarify do you recommend putting U.S. citizenship requirement if we're attending a U.S. institution now? Yes, I would if you were say looking at masters fellowships and you are enrolled in a U.S. program on U.S. soil I would include your foreign, your actual citizenship as well as U.S. because I think some of these are open to international students it's more that they can't fund you if you're not actually in the U.S. but if you have a student visa or work authorization then you may be eligible but the problem is the database is not that detailed that we really clarify between citizenship versus work authorization versus student visa like some of these opportunities are definitely open to international students in the U.S. so yes I will put that in but then just look more closely like if you go into here this archive research fellowship and then go to the website and look at what they say about eligibility and if it's still not clear from the program's website definitely email them and ask them Hey, would I be eligible as a Cornell student I'm an international student from x country would I be eligible for this and they should get back to you right away. Let me see others so Lomas in nutrition there's definitely fellowships in nutrition I'm going to just keep these clear for a minute but nutrition would probably fall under medicine and health sciences so if you want to apply some other filters depending on if you're looking for professional or doctoral or other types of fellowships you can narrow that down. There are the word Nutrition let's see what comes up If I just put in Nutrition there's 11 programs specific to nutrition but again at some of these are fully funded PhD programs there's some other specific ones but if you have some time get a hot drink, sit down look through all of the Medicine Health Science wants because again there could be a broader medical or health sciences or public health program that isn't specific to nutrition but through which you could get a foot in the door there could be a federal agency program there could be a non-profit program I would say keep it broad to Medicine Health Sciences. Hunter asked about Public Policy, there are tons now we do tend to bucket things in public policy under public service but also put in public policy I think there's so many because this was my first love I went to the field of public policy there's tons and tons of programs and public policy and even just in the realm of professional fellowships we have 76 results here so things like the Govern for America Fellowship this is a really cool opportunity this is a two-year paid fellowship for recent graduates to serve an high-impact roles in government across the country as a part of a diverse community of engaged leaders and they do all sorts of different things so this is a unique opportunity that I know of there's some for veterans to the core of fellowship and public affairs they have a couple of programs in places like New York, Boston, DC, LA, this is a great one to check out the core of fellowship, Alaska Fellows, I know someone who did this program seven to nine months in Alaska we're doing work with the Alaskan government with their partner organizations so many cool things use that word Public Policy but I also would encourage you to look again just broadly under the public service discipline. Nicholas asked for international policy for recent graduates. Awesome. I would say look at international affairs groups depending on if you want to be in a U.S. program like a U.S. based program look at North America and you could look at like less than five years of work experience this could be the kind of filters there's things like the nato 2030 Global Fellowship Program this is part of their public diplomacy this is for early war or mid-career professionals with strong demonstrated interests in transatlantic relations this sounds like this might be a non-resident programs this might be more of a unique like leadership and networking opportunity echoing Green this is for social entrepreneurs there's all sorts this Mortgage Acceleration Program is awesome this is while you stay in your current full-time job you can work with a map mentor helping to support a non-profit so there's lots of stuff like that But for international, now that's kind of an open idea it's open to lots of different disciplines but you can also narrow this down by foreign policy let me take out North American, foreign policy let's say you wanted to do Asia studies you could look more closely at that just depending on what security studies I would just use the word security that's a popular area I put in this less than five years sometimes they leave that off I'd just like to see what comes up International Developments try out different keywords in a way I can't spell International Development so you'll see lots of things in that way. Okay, Alexandra is looking at Law there's lots of interesting things in law this is a broad discipline you'll find professional fellowships in law or for people interested in law there will also be Masters Fellowships there might be fully funded PhD programs in law probably not fully funded JD programs but there's a couple of fully funded law programs but yeah, I would just look under the law discipline and then narrow it down based upon what type of programming you like, you guys have so much stuff I think I want to get over to the application tips but did this give you guys a good overview of what you can find in here is anyone getting excited about these opportunities. Julie asked when do fellowships usually start? A lot of fellowships even the professional ones will fall on that kind of academic year so they might start in a summer period or fall period like September but not all of them a lot of professional fellowships could start at any time of year but I do say there's a propensity for them to start around the same time as Academic Fellowships but you will find deadlines for programs at all times of year there's a little deadline sort here so if you wanted to see there's a couple of more deadlines that have just passed you can look forward and see, Oh, wait, so you can't apply for these tons have passed today and yesterday, these get updated about every two to three days but you'll see you can look ahead I'll also mention that on our open calls page I'm gonna put this link in the chat these are programs with our partners they are advertising a whole bunch of a wide variety of really unique Fellowships some of these are brand new as well let me put that into the chat, now just in the interest of time I'm gonna have Q&A at the end if you want more help looking in the database but let me hop over to my tips about getting into these programs so I was pretty successful getting into fellowships early in my career when I first applied for the New York City Urban Fellows Program i'll be honest my senior advisor told me I probably had no chance of getting into it because I had a three-two GPA and I wasn't an honor student, I didn't have any internships on my resume so just on the outset from an outsider's view I probably didn't look like a great top candidate for this nationally competitive program taking twenty-five recent graduates from all over the country but I was very active in community service and I had a sense of what these organizations were really looking for and this is the sense of something that I've applied to all my applications over the years but also when I found the ProFellow ten years ago I started asking fellowship winners what do you think made your application stand out and I found that a lot of multi award winners were doing things very similar to what I was doing in my applications so I want to share with you the five secrets this is gonna be different than getting into college and it is even different than applying to jobs so let me explain why. My tip number one is to align your goals because actually these fellowships are not about helping you achieve your goals it's about the funding body's mission and goals, I think this is a great audience for me to speak to because you're part of the I-horn center or you're interested in doing socially impactful work this is a good start you are in the right place all of these fellowship organizations have a social impact mission of their own so they are investing money in students and professionals as a way to advance their social impact mission so these are not needs-based awards these are not meant to be financial aid again, they're also not just to give you career development although they do that as a consequence but all of these organizations are trying to solve some sort of problem so they're looking at place-based economic underdevelopment or they're looking at climate change or they're looking at helping to diversify industries so if you want to know how to be a competitive candidate the very first thing you should do is look at the funding body's mission and goals so look at the website carefully make sure you understand what's the organizations mission, what problems are they trying to solve, who were they working with, what's important to them that'll give you a sense of why they created this fellowship if they have limited information on their website you could also look at previously funded projects or fellows what are they doing, what's their goals and you could also identify what they brag about sometimes these fellowships are really extraordinary but the organizations behind them could be quite small they might have small staff their website might be very limited Of course if they had info sessions or offer opportunities to speak with them take those opportunities but what I did for the New York City Urban Fellows Program is back in the 2000's, they had a one-page website it just said this is what the program is here's the deadline and here's the application together you had to email to get it or something there was no information about what's the mission of this program, I was looking around to try to find out and understand like what makes this program tick what's the purpose of it and I read that the director had bragged that 80% of Urban Fellows go on to work long term in New York City Government and I was like, oh, that's the mission of the program the mission is to find recent graduates who are committed to working in New York City government long term so once I knew that that was the mission and the goal of the program I was able to put that into my application as my goal as a government major that was very much in alignment with something I wanted to do early on I didn't really have clear goals but I thought working in New York City Government would be a great career track and so we talked about how this would be a great stepping stone to a long-term career in New York City Government and I do think that piece made my application stand out and out-compete other people who probably said Oh, I'm gonna go to law school or I want to work in federal government or I wanna go work in international affairs if you put that as your career goal it wouldn't have been in alignment with the program's mission so that's why it's important to understand the mission the other reason it's important to understand the mission is to make sure that you actually are truly aligned with this I don t think it's a good idea to apply it to fellowships just because they might sound good on your resume or seemed like something that you should do, I think you should apply to programs that are truly aligned with your interests, your passions and sort of what you bring to the table that's where you're going to have the best success in any case getting into these programs so if you see something that's in your field if the organization is doing something that excites you, you found a great and perfectly aligned Fellowship for you. My second tip kind of building on this as to be highly specific about your future goals so a lot of applicants make the mistake of not specifying a future career goal It's almost like the goal is just to get the fellowship but there's no future information the organization is really want to know what are you going to do post fellowship this is same for graduate school what are you gonna do postgraduate school so you want to be pretty specific about what you wanna do post fellowship and this is again to help them find out are they investing in the right person for this program and I think being specific is really helpful because it helps them to visualize the future you and it'll help you draw a story about how the fellowship is going to give you unique skills and experiences and networks that you need to achieve a future goal so it helps hook them into the story of why do you need this fellowship, why you, why this fellowship, why now so when I say a highly specific goal let me give an example, I'll see someone say my future goal is to go to law school so I wanna do this fellowship because I'll get a chance to look at legal issues maybe in family law but they'll just say generally I want to go to law school but really the future goals should be something around the lines of I want to be practicing public interest lawyer working for an NGO such as X's who's focused on family legal practices for children and vulnerable situations like really be specific about what type of role, what type of organization and what social problem you want to help solve. This does a couple of things number one it will help you be more specific about why are you applying to the fellowship but two it also helps the reader of your application visualize you in that future role and it just makes for a stronger application people with really specific goals are more compelling than people with vague or varied goals so I'll just leave it at that. My tip number three is about storytelling this is another thing I think I was good at from a young age my father is a Lutheran ministers so I basically learned the art of storytelling through watching him give sermons and tell stories throughout his entire career so I talk a lot about storytelling in the fellowship application because when you develop an application you are telling a story and the fact it has to be a compelling story why you, why this program, why now I say the application story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, all programs will ask you about your background so the beginning of the story is about your background, your academic background, your professional background, and also what things are motivating you, why did you choose this career track, why do you care about social impact that is the beginning of the story the end of the story is in the future that's where you talk about your really specific post program goal you're visualizing yourself you have a vision for your career and what you wanna do what problems you want to help solve in the middle of the story is the hook how is the fellowship able to help you achieve that goal the key of all this is to demonstrate that without the fellowship your goal may not be achieved now it's true that these fellowships are very unique each fellowship is going to provide you a network or experience that you probably will not be able to get in a typical job or other type of opportunity or even when you're looking at grad schools, one grad school is going to have unique aspects that are not found in other grad schools so again you really want to show that what is unique about this fellowship for you and for your goals for example New York City Urban Fellows, I didn't have any other way to get my foot in the door in a local government New York City government job the Urban Fellows program really was the foot in the door I didn't really have any other networks or experience or even internships that could have gotten me into New York City government so that was the hook of my story about I want to work in New York City long term and really this is my one and only opportunity to really get in at the Edison entry-level graduate and build the networks that I need for this career so likewise you need to make that case in your application and the applicants that have a stronger case are the ones who make it to the finalists round. Tip number four is about adding urgency so people are always a little surprised by this tip but really all fellowship programs they're competitive just like jobs and grad school and they're always going to have more qualified applicants than they have spots that's just the reality so often is you have to sort of edge out other candidates based on pretty small details so when a committee is looking at two equally strong and qualified candidates, I have found that they might lean toward the candidate that has a more urgent reason to undertake the fellowship and often this has to do with what you've put into your proposal if you're doing a project it might also have to do with the timeline how this fellowship fits into a longer-term timeline of your career or even work that you might be doing professionally so some ways that you can explain why you need this fellowship now and not in a year or two years if you are proposing a project you could study what I call a fleeting phenomenon Look at something that's happening now but it's gonna be different in the future so I worked in the field of disaster management so a lot of my project proposals had to do with looking at the community's impact from a disaster or how a disaster piece of legislation is going to impact the community so it was something that was kind of time-limited thing that I was going to look at, you can also just tie it to something related to current events in general so rather than looking something historical or not timely there's so many issues of our time like gun control, education, climate change you know if you're not sure what project to pick I recommend picking something that's timely and is regularly in the news you could also propose a project that's part of a longer term initiative maybe you're going to lay the groundwork I'm going to collect baseline data for this larger long-term projects I'm going to build a network of stakeholders so that in the future when I'm building my social enterprise and then have a network of people who care about public interests law to build the social enterprise those kind of stories are what add urgency you could also talk about prep for grad school for PhD programs you do need to have some research experience for other types of grad school you may need corporate experience, non-profit experience, language skills so think about what you could get out of this that might be preparing you for grad school that's another urgency factor, just a few ideas you can get really creative with this. My final tip is to speak to former fellows so I found that a key difference between success and rejection is that many winners had spoken to former fellows so I can give you lots of tips about being a competitive applicant however the real experts on any one particular fellowship program will be the people who were on the fellowship or recently completed the fellowship so these are people that you can ask questions about the selection committee, the feasibility of your proposal what are they looking for in candidates, what did they ask in the interview, these are questions that really only the fellows can answer so try to get personal introductions to people who have done these fellowships if you find a program number one you can always ask the fellowship organization if they can introduce you to a fellow sometimes they have ambassadors or they might be having an info session where you can meet Fellows so definitely go to the info sessions and connect with them on LinkedIn, also LinkedIn advanced search is a great way to find Fellows I use LinkedIn pretty aggressively over the course of my career just the free version you can put the name of the fellowship in there and find people who have been on the fellowship if you have a first connection that means you know somebody who's done the fellowship, if you have a second connection that means you know someone who's done the fellowship or you have a mutual connection to a fellow so ask your mutual connection to introduce you even if it's a third connection I would encourage you to still reach out because a lot of fellows are very happy to speak to applicants I would just say to mentioned that you're applying to x fellowship I have some specific questions I'd love to connect with you, definitely look and see what Cornell Alumni might have done this fellowship there's tons and tons of Cornell Alumni who have done all sorts of incredible fellowships if you see a Cornell alum in LinkedIn or online and you're not personally connected to them or know anybody who knows them just reach out to them let them know I'm a Cornell student or alumnus, I'm applying to this fellowship I'd love to speak with you, like 90% of the time they'll get back to you if they use that platform so those are great ways to find fellows who have done these programs. Finally, I always say get into a winner's mindset I see so many high achievers get really hung up on the competitiveness of a lot of these fellowships but like I said the competitiveness is not about having the best grades or being a genius or being someone who already has one million awards on your resume that's not what they're looking for they're looking for people who are aligned with their social impact mission and who have shown some demonstrated commitment to the issues that they're working on or to community service, community engagement so if you're related to the I-horn center or doing work with the I-horn center or involved in any way That's a demonstrated commitment to socially impactful work so this is a great way to demonstrate your commitment so just know you are the right person for these awards I always encourage people not to get hung up on the numbers, the competitiveness so just again make sure you create your free account and ProFellow know that this is created by a Cornell alum our social impact mission ourselves is to help you find these awards we want more people and more diverse people to find and get into these programs so that they're not just word of mouth were shared and privileged circles, that's really our goal so use that database when you sign up for the database make sure to get on our mailing lists because every week we send out a newsletter called ProFellow insider we're sharing new calls for applications we share our popular articles we share our events and so you don't want to miss out on those things you'll discover some cool stuff so that's it, that's my presentation so I wanted to leave some time for questions and let me look into it you can put a question in the chat or maybe it's a small enough group. Mike, I'll defer to you, what do you think for questions, I can stay as long as necessary I think that's fine there is a question there you might see. Yes, this question is what tips do you have for getting letters of recommendation especially if we are applying to multiple fellowships? Okay, great question so for recommendation letters, first of all it is good to know in advance all of the things you're going to apply for a lot of people do apply for fellowships and grad schools and multiple programs at once I'm actually of the mind that you really do need to prep your referees adequately to make sure that your letters are detailed and effective but it can feel like a big ask to go ask a professor, Hey, can you prepare ten wreck letters, I recommend that you create a google folder for each program or fellowship that you're applying to, let's say there is like ten programs and you need your senior advisor to write you that each program should have its own sub folder that includes in it. The empty business letter template shows who is this for? What program is this for? This is just so that the professor or boss can just pop that into their letterhead if that's necessary or just know this has to go to so and so if there's a person to direct it to you should also provide them for each program a brief description of what the program is or what it's for, what the funding is for and you should provide them bullet points of what you would like them to include in the letter, some programs will have specific prompts for the referee like please discuss this person's leadership potential their commitment to this issue and their emotional maturity or something like that, of course don't put bullet points for emotional immaturity but just make sure that they have the prompt if that's provided to you but also provide them bullet points of things that you'd like them to include now note that a referee cannot really comment on things that are unrelated to your relationships, you know your professor can't speak to what you're doing in your professional job If they're not related to that they should really only be speaking to the things that they did while you were there student or their advisee, your bullets should just be related, I got an "A" on this paper, I actively engaged in class, part of the student's club on X, just have them do that and then have different sets of bullets for each referee for each program. The other thing is if you are going to ask somebody for five to ten reference letters at once you gotta give them a lot of time, two months before the deadline you shouldn't have this ready we've got Thanksgiving coming up holidays, this is something that your referee has to do in their free time they're not being compensated for it you want to give them as much time as possible that's why I say create the google folder, sub folders for each program of course include your CV and if it feels necessary you can also sit down and have a meeting with them to kind of walk through each program and item that you're applying to the chances are they're going to create one kind of templated letter for you and then they might tweak it for each program depending on this is a fellowship now this is a grad school you might need to help them with that a bit so that they can do that in an efficient amount of time so that's why I say you got to prepare your referees so they feel fully supported, do not just say, Hey, I need ten reference letters here's the prompts. Good luck. Thank you. Here's the deadline. I would not do that that might not result in what you want. Good luck, that's my recommendation for that and also this is another reason too we should think about over the course of our career just having a lot of people that we can turn to for reference letters that's why professional networking and professional network building is so important so that you don't have to rely on just one or two people for all the things that you're gonna apply to you really want to make sure you have a nice repertoire of referees. Alright, let's see, Nicholas asked for international fellowships. Do we need to know another language aside from English? How important is this? Oh, this really varies from program to program I did the Germans chance to fellowship they did not require German language experience and in fact they gave us immersion classes in German that was a big plus other programs though may require that you have language experience I do want to note if any of you have heard of the Fulbright awards, the Fulbright awards are a huge international fellowship program funded by the U.S. State Department, It's a big Diplomacy Program and they have awards at all different levels so they have a U.S. student program that people do in their early career you can do a research project or study abroad or do an english teaching assistantship then there's a U.S. scholar award for faculty graduate students experienced professionals so there's often lots of specialty awards too. What we found with the Fulbright, the English language the language departments really dependent on the country so each country, some countries a lot of people speak English fluently if you go to Germany or Norway or even places like Mexico you may be able to get by in english but other countries you can't really do that so it just depends on what they expect but for example, Fulbright English we started compiling it was like 100 plus, Let me see if I can find this article, 100 plus countries where you're going to pursue a Fulbright Award in English, I'll pop that in the chat if you're looking at the Fulbright this is a little bit outdated but it probably won't be that different now but they said some require it some don't so let me just pop that in the chat for you but I would say in general though if you have language skills of some sort let's say you do speak a second language or you're studying a second language an International fellowship can be a great way to get an immersive experience to advance your language skills so if you speak Spanish you could look at fellowships in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries Could be Mexico, Central South America could be awesome. Nicholas asked, under the Fulbright app has passed as possible to apply through Cornell even after you have graduated? Actually, yes. The misnomer for Fulbright, the Fulbright U.S. student award which is the one you may be aware of a lot of people do apply their senior year but you can also apply at-large after you've graduated typically up until about five years of work experience after five years of work experience it's probably not going to be quite the right fit because it is really geared toward recent graduates but yes, this one you could apply next year note there is a early deadlines this year was October 10th so we estimated it to be about October 10th next year but however I want to mention that when you're not a student anymore you can apply at large but you can still work with the Cornell Fellowship Office for advising on the Fulbright some people want to do that some people don't just depends if you want to do this on your own or if you want to get help from the Fulbright office at Cornell I think that would be a good thing to do so definitely reach out to the Cornell Fulbright office and Mike who's the Cornell Fulbright advisor actually let me google that real quick, I just put it in there I think it is Beth, that's what I figured Beth is in the Fellowships  office for Cornell, I met Beth many years ago when I was looking at the loose Scholars Program this is another really cool International Fellowship let me pop that in, their office helps guide students it's on a smaller number of really well-known and prestigious fellowships, Loose scholars is another one for recent graduates in Asia people with up to age thirty so it's kind of a good early career program, I'll throw that in the chat, definitely let Beth now if you are planning to apply to this award also other programs like Rhodes, Truman, Marshall, there's a couple of really big nationally competitive fellowships that the Cornell office will advise on but a lot of these other fellowships may not be really what they focus on like Urban Fellows that might not be so you cannot still reach out to them for advice. Mike put in the chat this fellowships competition, this is great for Cornell these are the ones you'll see this is like a shorter list of fellowships these are really nationally competitive fellowships so it is good to work with the Fellowships Office for these, any other questions I can help with, If not, we are at the hours so we can wrap up but I got one more question about letters of rec, who should write your letters of recommendation?  this depends on whether it's a more professionally oriented fellowship or an academic fellowship if you're applying to a research fellowship, graduate school and others often over the two out of the three recommendations probably need to be from professors, one could be from something else like professional or others for the professional fellowships it could be two professional and one academic sometimes even three professional just kinda depends on what they're looking for so the recommendation letters are really just to verify that you are committed to the field that you have the skills that you say you have et, so if you think about it a researcher academically oriented fellowship wants to hear from the academics write about your skills a professionally oriented fellowship might be more interested in hearing about your commitment to community service, the work that you've done, how you work in teams, so really just depends I would encourage you not to be afraid to ask the fellowship staff these questions because they should be happy to tell you, professional references are really what we're looking for or professors are really what we're looking for, they will be happy to tell you what they're expecting so don't be afraid to ask those questions and Nicholas, Yes, I do have an email for further questions let me put it in the chat, I'm only giving this to you guys because I'm Cornelian, I wouldn't normally give out my e-mail because I as a Director of my organization sometimes it's quite difficult for me to get back to people, just let me know you're from Cornell from the Cornell talk or I horn center and I'd be happy to respond as soon as I can get back to you and you can also find me on LinkedIn if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn use this e-mail Vicki@ProFellow.com because it's going to prompt you to know my e-mail address this is the e-mail to use and just let me know that you came to my Cornell talk or watch the replay I would be happy to connect with you and have a great community and by the way I am a good person to connect with I know literally thousands of fellowship winners but I have this network that can be tapped into for that purpose and I am happy to do that for Cornell students and alumni. Alright. Amazing. Thank you so much, Dr. Johnson this has been incredible I've learned a lot, thank you for Spending the time with us tonight. Absolutely. Yeah, Like I said have some fun with this database, sit down, I mean this is the thing I wish existed when I was early in my career, I geek out over this stuff like funding to do cool stuff live ,work, travel all over the world like I said take some time enjoy the database and certainly be part of the ProFellow community we would love to have you, Let's see what folks are saying. Oh, thank you guys, Thank you so much and Mike thank you again for hosting me I'm gonna be more involved in the I-horn  center as part of the alumni advisory groups so I'm excited about that and hope that some of you too will be getting involved with the I-horn center. Alright, thanks so much everyone.