I am the FPA at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, an independent liberal arts college of approximately 2300 undergraduate students. Since I began recruiting for Fulbright in 2000, St. Francis has had four students apply for awards. Weíre all quite thrilled at the success of this yearís candidate. Alissar Maaliki is a pre-med student who will go to Morocco to study herbal medicine and help compile a database of medicinal plants. What follows is an overview of the campus interview committee process that helped us achieve this opportunity for her and for furthering the Fulbright mission.

The combination of expertise and congeniality can make the campus interview effective for the Fulbright process, and less intimidating and more enjoyable for the candidate. I believe that foreign living experience is the most important expertise to have on the committee. The excitement, displacement, adjustment, otherness, bonding, cultural sensitivity, confusion, and adventure that comprise the daily experience of living in a foreign country, is a kind of personal experience that cannot be substituted. Remember that foreign faculty or staff who have come to live and work in the States have that expertise as well as Americans who have lived abroad.

I have assembled a committee that has both continuity and flexibility in its membership. In addition to myself there are three core, continuing members, and one or more temporary members who have expertise relevant to the candidates being interviewed. Two of the three core members were chosen for their extensive foreign living experience. The third was chosen because she is well known among the students for her extraordinary rapport with them. Any interview process is intimidating for students; I wanted at least one member with the ability to quickly put students at ease. The temporary members also make important contributions. One of our first candidates applied for a Fulbright to Spain, so I invited a member of the Foreign Language Dept. to conduct part of the interview in Spanish. A member of the Biology Dept. was part of Alissarís committee interview in order to help us judge the feasibility and validity of her project.

Having a mixed group of core and temporary members serves several purposes. It gets more faculty and staff involved in the Fulbright endeavor, and raises the profile of Fulbright among the college community. Itís also a logistical help to small institutions where a permanent standing committee might not be feasible.

As an FPA, you should be aware that members of a new committee need a bit of guidance. Even if some members have held Fulbrights, they would not be familiar with the student interview process. Before the first interview, I send each member of the committee photocopies of the following information: the candidateís application and letters of recommendation; and photocopies of these items from the FPA manual: the sample interview questions; the blank evaluation form; and the filled out samples of the form (poor and well done). Larger institutions with a lot of candidates might want to make the candidatesí information available for committee members to drop by and see.

During the interviews, I serve mostly as a facilitator rather than a primary interviewer. Since Iíve worked with the candidates on their applications and have gotten to know them, I give the other committee members the opportunity to do most of the interviewing. We leave time between interviews for members and I to complete our campus evaluation forms.

In writing up the evaluation form that gets submitted with the candidateís application, my concern has been to fairly represent the views of all the committee members. Thus I see my job not as writing the evaluation per se, but as combining the responses to provide a coherent whole. For example, I condense oft-repeated comments to a single statement. I include unique important points. I choose comments with the most specific language and leave out overly general comments. I use the membersí own words, combining and making minor edits to provide a cohesive style for the evaluation. I donít know whether this method is practicable for FPAs with a lot of candidates, but I hope it gives you some ideas to build on.

In addition to inviting and thanking members informally, I write brief letters of invitation and of thanks for serving. Besides being a nice touch of appreciation from Fulbright, such letters document the committee service for any members who might later need to apply for promotion or tenure.

Alissarís winning of the Fulbright has taken center stage at St. Francis. The College has an annual Student Recognition Day, and this year Alissar was one of the students honored. She presented a talk on her Fulbright project. The College Relations and Admission Departments have featured Alissar on the Collegeís Web site and in literature sent to prospective students. Sheíll also be highlighted in the alumni magazine and the Presidentís annual report. Of course my own recruitment materials will feature her as well. The student Fulbright programís own outreach efforts also played a part in Alissarís success: she first heard about the Fulbright program through her online subscription to FastWeb, a scholarship search service.

My experience has been that colleagues genuinely enjoy serving on the campus interview committee. Iíve even had a temporary member ask to be invited back! Members enjoy hearing about the studentsí plans and interests, and are quite taken with the studentsí intellectual curiosity and sense of adventure. Iíve also found that members with foreign living experience are especially attuned to the Fulbright concern for mutual international understanding. Getting together for the student Fulbright interviews is committee duty that we all actually look forward to.