University Scholarship Opportunity

[sighyoung]

Since some folks here have students approaching college age, I thought I should mention a fellowship program my son participated in at the University of Louisville. It's the J. Graham Brown fellowship, which is a service-oriented fellowship that covers tuition, books, housing, and pays a small stipend for students to attend one of two schools: the University of Louisville and Centre College (which is a very good liberal-arts college). Besides visiting all parts of the state of Kentucky over four years, the fellowship covered a trip to Europe and study in China. It's a wonderful fellowship program, and I would highly recommend it.

http://www.brownfellows.org/

[GeddyWrox]

Thanks Sigh!

My older kiddo is going to be a Junior next year, so we're going to have to start getting serious about visiting schools and other research.

Unfortunately, my son doesn't get straight A's. He's smart as sh!t but just won't apply himself enough to qualify for a lot of this stuff.

Any idea how they weight the decision process for full ride scholarships like this?

[heyzeus]

Btw, a good friend of mine is a professor at Centre College (and I believe just got offered tenure!). He is a history professor, and his area of scholarship is the history of baseball in Taiwan and it's role in Chinese-Taiwanese relations. A pretty cool area of expertise, especially considering he was born and raised in Ireland.

[tlombard]

That's definitely an interesting area of focus and one I could actually get into!

At Thanksgiving there was a guy at my grandma's (no clue how he's related) who was visiting my grandma's cousin from Canada and he is a retired professor who taught 'Ancient Medieval Philosophy' at Notre Dame. I'm thinking he meant philosophy from ancient to the medieval period but that's the way he said it unless I heard him incorrectly. He was definitely an interesting guy.

[sighyoung]

Thanks Sigh!

My older kiddo is going to be a Junior next year, so we're going to have to start getting serious about visiting schools and other research.

Unfortunately, my son doesn't get straight A's. He's smart as sh!t but just won't apply himself enough to qualify for a lot of this stuff.

Any idea how they weight the decision process for full ride scholarships like this?

Hi GeddyWrox,

Grades would matter, but they don't have to be perfect. If he's active in the community or volunteers, that's a big plus--most programs want fairly well-rounded applicants--people who do well at school, but balance a rich academic life and extracurricular life. (They're looking for people who will not only go to class, but contribute to the life of the college and community in a variety of ways.)

In addition, there's an interview portion for the fellowship--a couple of days, in fact, of one interview after another after another, and the ability to be creative and expressive matters a lot.

For this fellowship (which is not limited to Kentucky residents, by the way), they want people who are both smart and service-oriented, who will genuinely benefit from the fellowship opportunity, and who will go on to be ambassadors for the state, if you will. Every Brown fellow I've met has been smart but also a genuinely good person, often volunteering at the respective school or university.

Each year, there are 10 fellows selected for the University of Louisville, and 10 for Centre College. Over the course of four years, they visit one of eight parts of the state of Kentucky and learn about its history and region. There's a summer orientation before freshman year, and after the first year two weeks in Europe (around Strasbourg, so they visit France, Germany, and Switzerland, and my son also visited Amsterdam and Rome). The fellowship covers tuition, room, and board, and also provides support for summer projects--so my son has studied in China for a month, for instance.

It's just a terrific program, and it sets students up for later success. Partly because of his experiences in the fellowship, my son got into a PPIA summer institute program at Carnegie Mellon last year, received a Critical Language Scholarship to China this summer, and got a Fulbright to Taiwan beginning in August.

Students have advisers in the program that provide lots of support and guidance, and the peer group is wonderful. The program was the best part of my son's undergraduate education, even without the generous financial support.

[GeddyWrox]

Again, great info. Thanks so much!