Fulbright award notifications were trickling in, and as the Fulbright campus adviser at Lehman College in the Bronx, I was glued to the application portal and kept my phone close. I often see results before the students I advise do, but I try to wait for them to contact me.
As I dealt with tears of joy and of sorrow, I realized that one student, a buoyant, ambitious English major who had applied to become a Fulbright fellow, had not reached out. A grocery cashier with a packed schedule, she made survival her priority. She had grown up in subsidized housing and had secured her teaching certificate by senior year while managing a full-time class load. The Fulbright experience was something she had time to dream about only on the subway after work.
And now she had won a Fulbright to study in Spain.
I hesitated before interrupting her workday with the good news. She had to ask permission to take the call, and she spoke with me from a bathroom. The tears, disbelief and relief she expressed were familiar to me. Winning a Fulbright is exciting, but to many first-generation college students, it offers more than excitement: an escape from a place heavy with doubts to a place where they are associated with a brand that showcases their credibility as scholars.
Yet these victories are rare. Too many first-generation and low-income students are not seen in full by selection committees and miss the chance to become nationally recognized scholars.
If award foundations genuinely want to open doors for students with varied talents, backgrounds and perspectives, they must engage gatekeepers who know, on a visceral level, who these students are.
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I was one of the lucky first-generation students who did win a Fulbright. At 23, I was an honors student at Lehman, working overtime while staying active on campus. Yet, before applying for selective awards, I hesitated. It was not a question of whether I felt good enough; when I looked at the portraits of award winners, it was rare then, and it is still rare now, to find a face that looks like mine.
I worked from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. as a teacher’s assistant at an early childhood center, and nights and weekends as a house manager at a transitional housing program, squeezing in study between classes and work shifts.
My time, attention and energy were divided, but I craved the experiences described in the fellowship applications. There was so much I wanted to do for my community, my peers, my family, myself.
In 2003, I was shocked to receive a Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship, which allowed me to intern at the New York State Supreme Court, the New York City Council Committee on Mental Health and the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice in Accra, Ghana.
In 2004, I received a Ronald E. McNair scholarship and met advisers who were highly accomplished and eager to mentor the next generation of leaders.
Each award granted me the privilege of time. Rather than worry about paying for every course from my job earnings, I now had the luxury of conducting research, accepting those unpaid internships, buying books, attending conferences and building professional relationships.
A decade ago, I created an office at Lehman to support students applying for nationally prestigious awards, now known as the Campus Honors and Scholar Engagement program. Many of our students care for family members. They keep the lights on by working in the gig economy and at minimum wage jobs.
These students need guides and mentors. They need to assemble their version of what I called my board of directors — those who inspired me and taught me how to get past gatekeepers.
I also had the defiance of a Caribbean upbringing that laughs in the face of oppression. Like me, these students have ancestors whispering: “There is more, and we will support you.”
I have sat on selection panels for nationally competitive awards like the Gilman, Critical Language Scholarship, Cargill and Fulbright fellowships. I have read the application essays and stories of students from rural and urban America, and from public and Ivy League institutions.
Often, narratives that stood out to me for the complexity of students’ lives were overlooked by my committee peers whose relative privilege led them to see institutional brands as the primary marker of intelligence and potential.
While some fellowships, including the Fulbright, issue nationwide calls for reviewers, many others continue to recruit from among the same nondiverse institutions, alumni networks and academic circles.
The gatekeepers risk missing out on applicants whose promise is richer and more complex than connections to top-tier internships, elite schools and high-profile recommenders.
Expanding reviewer pools through outreach to institutions serving historically underrepresented communities is an essential step in selecting a broader range of excellent fellows, including those like my student with the grocery store job, whose family’s struggles with the English language fueled her desire to teach other English language learners.
In Spain, she found herself questioning everything she knew about language learning and discovering new ways to engage and create meaningful experiences for her students in an unfamiliar culture. She returned from her Fulbright bolstered by a new self-assurance: She earned a graduate degree in education from Hunter College and now teaches high school English in Brooklyn.
I tell her story to encourage my students. I introduce them to nationally competitive and well-resourced awards, as well as to those that are lesser known and under-resourced but can be transformative.
I give them a pathway to publishing and other accomplishments. Most of all, I teach them to love their narratives and to share them with care and attention so that they can, and do, stand out.
Alice Augustine is founding director of Campus Honors and Scholar Engagement at Lehman College and a Paul & Daisy Soros fellow and public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about national awards for college students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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