Thanks to the first year of the Global Summer Fellows Program, 38 students participating in 19 different study abroad programs will be able to travel to countries around the world for an uncommon summer experience.
The Global Summer Fellows Program was proposed by junior Wyatt Smith and senior Joseph Williams during Williams' tenure as Vanderbilt Student Government president and initiated with the help of the Global Education Office and Richard McCarty, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. The program would offer scholarships to students for summer study abroad programs from a $250,000 fund.
Smith, who is the current VSG president, said he wanted to expand access to study abroad programs to students who normally would not be able to go abroad, particularly due to financial and time constraints.
Before the Global Summer Fellows Program was proposed, the only option of financial aid available to students for summer study abroad was loan-based due to strict federal guidelines that required financial aid to be spent only on a semester basis.
In the original proposal, applications would include essays and a budget plan for how applicants would spend their scholarship, as well as an interview in which students would explain their financial need and how studying abroad would enrich their undergraduate careers. Smith said he initially estimated that the program would be able to grant 25 to 30 students scholarships that would not exceed $8,500.
Smith said he especially wanted student representation to serve on the selection committee and to take part in the interview process.
"The idea was to provide an added perspective to the review process in understanding the managing of intense academic coursework and campus involvement," he said.
He did not want to be personally involved in awarding the scholarships, however. Once the program was approved and funded by the provost's office, he entrusted the implementation and administration of the program to Ara Pachmayer, the director of the Global Education Office.
According to Assistant Provost for International Affairs Joel Harrington, the process was set up in two parts - a financial need assessment and a written application which consisted of a two-page essay in which students explained how studying abroad would help them develop as global citizens and why they could not study abroad during the school year, a current transcript, resume, proposed budget and letter of recommendation.
A committee of faculty members from all four undergraduate colleges ranked the applicants based on their responses, combining these scores with the compiled scores of financial need to determine the final allotment of scholarship awards.
"It was an extremely fair and rigorous process, and generous considering the financial pressures on the university. We're about the only institution offering a scholarship for the summer; there's nothing like it. The scholarship shows Vanderbilt's strong commitment to study abroad," Harrington said.
The selection process, however, did differ slightly from Smith's original plan. The student representatives and applicant interviews, key components of the original proposal for the program, were not included in the review process for reasons of personal and financial privacy, as well as time constraints, explained Dawn Turton, executive director of the Vanderbilt International Office.
Turton said the response to the Global Summer Fellows program was both unexpected and overwhelming. She said they had anticipated 40 to 50 applicants, but instead received 119. The sheer number of applications was a major factor in the committee's decision to not conduct interviews.
"It just became impossible," Turton said. "Just reading over the applications along with four committee members was quite an involved process." The committee decided that interviews would only be held if a tiebreaker were necessary to choose between students with identical financial need and evaluation scores, a situation that did not occur.
She also said the committee made the decision to not include student representatives in the application review process because of the sensitive nature of the financial need information and some answers to the essay questions.
"Some of the things students put in their applications were incredibly personal," Turton said. "We didn't anticipate that. I could not envision a situation where a student would have written these things and have felt comfortable having other students read them. Some of them were very moving, to the point of tears. It was a judgment call (to not include students on the committee)."
Turton, Harrington and Smith all agreed that the process could be reassessed to better prepare for the program's second year. Turton said they especially need to be better prepared to handle the unexpected, like the overwhelming number of applications as well as guarding against overly personal responses to allow for student representation on the selections committee.
"Any feedback we get is good feedback because it's the first year of the program," Turton said.
Each also said they were proud to be able to fund a summer abroad for 38 students who otherwise would have been unable to go, an effort Harrington and Turton said is unique to Vanderbilt.
"(The development of Global Summer Fellows) is my proudest accomplishment I've had in student government. It's also something we need to reassess going forward - look at the model, look at how it's carried out, and then track those outcomes from this summer, and then make recommendations for how it should be carried out going forward," Smith said.
Hannah Twillman contributed reporting to this article.
