Fred Block | Research professor of sociology at U.C. Davis
First Phase of 2016-2017 Fellowship Application Process Complete!
We are very pleased that more than 350 students have applied for the Center for Engaged Scholarship dissertation fellowship. That is many more than we expected, and it indicates that there is a huge population of graduate students who are using the tools of social science to produce positive social change.
People applied from all over the country and from a wide range of different disciplines.
Our review process is now getting underway. There will be several rounds of outside review to choose the finalists, and we expect to make our final decisions in April.
We are very grateful to more than a hundred faculty people who have agreed to participate in this review process, and we will be asking more people to be reviewers to handle this large number of applications. We also want to thank more than a thousand faculty members who have (or will soon) submit recommendation letters for the applicants.
We have learned a lot from this first fellowship cycle. The website has sometimes been clunky and we apologize to everybody who has fought with it for longer than they should have. We hope that we will be able to eliminate many of those bugs by the next time around. But it is also important to acknowledge that without the automation that the website permits, we wouldn’t be doing this at all. Just imagine the size of the staff that it would take to process 350 applications and supporting materials if everything were being sent through postal mail.
We plan that this fellowship program will continue and be able to support even more students in subsequent years. By September 1st, we will announce the call for the 2017-18 application. We expect to make some changes in the deadlines and procedures, but final decisions will only be made after we complete this cycle.
Please send us feedback as to how we can improve all aspects of this fellowship process. Write us at info@cescholar.org.