Gilman Scholarship | The Most Beneficial, The Most Extensive
"Please address all of the following questions, in no particular order (max of 7,000 characters):
1. How will studying or interning abroad help you achieve your future academic or professional goals?
2. Why did you select your specific program AND host country?
3. What aspects of studying or interning abroad do you expect to be the most challenging for you?
4. What knowledge, skills, and experiences will you draw on to meet these challenges?" (Essays, 2020).
"Gilman Scholars represent the United States as citizen diplomats in their host communities; they reflect a diversity of values, beliefs, and opinions that is fundamental to providing a balanced representation of the United States abroad. Gilman Scholars are expected to contribute to the goal of building mutual understanding by sharing what it means to be an American, learning about the host culture, and building meaningful relationships.
Make a case for how you will serve as an effective citizen diplomat abroad.
The goal of the Follow-on Service Project is for Gilman Scholars to increase awareness of study abroad and the Gilman Scholarship among their peers in their home communities and campuses.
Summarize your Follow‐on Service Project Proposal in paragraph format by addressing all of the following questions, in no particular order.
What are your project goals? Who is your target population/audience and why did you select them? How will you integrate the impact of your experience abroad into your project? What, if any, campus departments, student organizations, or community organizations will you collaborate with in bringing awareness to study abroad and the Gilman Scholarship?" (Essay, 2020).
Gilman Scholarship
Impact that receiving the Gilman Scholarship would have on your achievement of these goals--
Why do you wish to study or intern abroad and what factors led you to this decision? What do you hope to gain from and what do you anticipate will be the impact of your experience abroad?
Describe your study or intern abroad program. What factors led you to select this program and length of study?
Academic
I am a huge believer in the idea that study abroad enhances a student’s educational prowess because it expands global connections and perspective. My degree is within the Global Studies Department at my university. Global Studies provides an interdisciplinary education and, like myself, sees the value in real experiences. So, the program I am applying for has both a curriculum and internship component. Through my degree, I am studying cultural production in Africa and I'm looking at cultural institutions specifically. Although I can learn about these topics and nuances from lectures, I believe real encounters can take my academics further. It is important to learn about international development in Kenya, but there is true value in seeing what that looks like and how Kenyans interpret it. I can study Kenyan culture and values, but actively seeing it take place and transform adds an incomparable perspective.
Professional
Personal narratives and informal knowledge by Kenyan intellectuals and citizens could make up significant parts of my profession. I am specifically interested in cultural institutions and how to re-define those spaces. Historically, cultural institutions like museums have not allowed communities to create their own knowledge, which makes museum content and spaces exclusive. Personal narratives are important because I want to make museum spaces that have content by the people for the people.
As you can see, I listed two or three questions from the prompt and then put in bold lettering above them the main message I wanted to make throughout my essay. I wanted to make sure I conveyed the impact that receiving the scholarship would have on my goals. So, another suggestion is to have a (4) main focus present throughout your essay that connects all your responses. Keep coming back to this focus/statement/idea to stay on track and manage rambling.
Impact that receiving the Gilman Scholarship would have on your achievement of these goals--
Why have you chosen your country of study? What factors led you to select this country?
AND
How will this study or intern abroad program and the coursework you take abroad impact your academic and future professional goals?
Academic
The type of coursework I will be studying in Kenya will have a focus on Kenyan development. First, there will be a focus on international development. Within my area of interest, I will be analyzing the relationship between Kenyan culture and development. There would be a specific focus on literature, art, film, and music. The focus aligns nicely to my academic focus in cultural production and my professional focus on museums as an expressive and educational medium. Second, there is a multidisciplinary study component of Kenya that emphasizes social science and history within a development context. The emphasis on development is important to contextual understanding Kenyan culture. Third, I will be studying Swahili which is an official language in Kenya. Language is just as important and contextual to culture as history can be. The last pinnacle component to this program is the internship. I am looking to be placed in a museum or cultural institution. However, the true importance in that experience is that it emphasizes community engagement. I’ll be working with a Kenyan organization and obtaining informal knowledge. Through my internship placement I hope to learn more about how museum content is made by and for the community.
I've divided my answers to the questions into either academic, professional, and personal goals/motivations so when I put together my essay I had organization. If I just answered the questions in order in my essay, then there would be some confusion and even repetition. I recommend this method so know you have (5) answered all the questions and (6) have clear organization in your essay.
Impact that receiving the Gilman Scholarship would have on your achievement of these goals--
Are there any distinctive components to this program, beyond coursework, that will impact your overall learning experience abroad? (i.e. home-stays, internships, field research, volunteer activities, extra-curricular activities, etc.)What challenges, if any, did you face in your decision to study or intern abroad? How did you meet these challenges and what impact do you foresee them having on your experience abroad? These could include but are not limited to, being a parent, being a non-traditional student, having a learning or physical disability, being in a field of study for which it is difficult to incorporate study abroad, etc.
Personal
A principle challenge I have faced in my decision to study abroad is informational. As a first generation college student, my family’s lack of impact and knowledge on my study abroad process has greatly affected how I approached my decision to study abroad. I have to say that I have obtained a deeper understanding of the nuances that go into choosing a study abroad experience, because through this process I have held on to the question, Am I choosing correctly? Due to the exceeding work I had to take on to guide myself through this decision, I can confidently say that the study abroad program I have chosen unites my personal desires, career goals, and educational hopes in an unmatched way. Which is something I can’t say as confidently if my family was, alternatively, well versed in the study abroad process and I did not have to shoulder the task of educating and connecting myself to the decision.
I am a student in the Institute for Global Studies with interest in diasporic African studies, cultural production, and museum education. As an African American woman, I am interested in how museums have misinterpreted my communities' histories. I believe culture is an ever changing phenomenon that is contingent on history. It is impossible to know or understand another culture without interacting with it deeply and over an extended period of time, which is why I have chosen a full-semester program with a homestay. I have interests in cultural art forms and how they can be presented in museums as an educational tool and a way to rewrite community narratives. I have learned that larger museum institutions have disserviced communities of color by presenting exclusive narratives that perpetuate stereotypes and educational oppression.
Alternatively, I have learned through my internship at the Minnesota Historical Society how museums are trying to amend that oppression. While an intern there, I realized what was still missing in these spaces was a global perspective on museum operation, especially when they have content that are incomplete representations of the communities they exhibit. I decided to look into this more by researching how culturally-specific institutions that teach history within the Black diaspora operate.
On a previous three-week study abroad in South Africa, I examined how South Africa’s history of aparthid was taught in museums. Then locally, I visited The Somali Museum of Minnesota and noticed that the communities’ ability to express their own histories created a platform to liberate their voices. Interestingly, I found similar dynamics in South African museums as in The Somali Museum of Minnesota. In both instances, museums were used as a space to promote narratives and cultural education by the community and for the community. I am currently writing my senior thesis on South Africa and how history is taught differently than in the US. Although Africa is an uncommon undergraduate area of study and non-traditional study abroad location, as a Black woman I have stakes in the fruition of the Black diaspora. Sub-Saharan Africa’s economic development can serve as an example of how important it is to center local voices in decision making processes. The Gilman scholarship will allow me to go and research Kenya’s economic and cultural development directly for a semester. So sub-Saharan, East Africa is a region that has academic and personal interest to me.
As a Minnesota resident, I know that we have one of the largest Somali populations outside of Somalia. This has prompted my interest in African migration, what migration does to communities, and how migration impacts people’s culture. Kenya happens to have some of the highest refugee populations in Africa, and I want to know how this impacts their society. The program I am looking into would send me to Kenya to learn more about their development and how it impacts their society from a local perspective. I am currently taking a course and conducting research on economic development discourse in Kenya. There has previously been an over-promotion of Eurocentric development paradigms, which begs the question of how they have impacted Kenyan culture. Though I have studied this, I could take my academics further by experiencing the paradigms first-hand. I would be able to better understand the connections between Kenyan cultural productions and economic development.
The program in Kenya also has a Swahili language and internship study component. I am interested in the conversations Kenyan museum professionals are having. I believe understanding how cultural identity is maintained through language will inform the dialogue of museum professionals, especially in a country with such a complex language landscape as Kenya, with indigenous languages and two national languages - Swahili and English - that are valued differently in education and professional spaces. Using South Africa as an example, the Zulu word ‘ubuntu’--meaning ‘I am because we are’--is an ideology and informs many dynamics and conversations. Learning about significant social values through language could really deepen my understanding of Kenyan cultures and value systems.
In alignment with my previous professional experience, I hope to be placed in an internship with an arts and education development NGO where I’ll be able to gain more global perspectives on how institutions function. The Gilman scholarship will allow me to study changes in Kenyan cultures and how they exhibit their art and promote history education to different audiences. As a self-supporting student, The Gilman Scholarship would allow me to have such meaningful experiences and increase my knowledge as a student of African studies. It would allow me to expand my credibility as a museum professional and pursue my goals in that career. One of my biggest aspirations is to attend a museum studies graduate program, which would make me the first one in my extended paternal family to go to graduate school. I want to further study how African diasporic communities in the US can liberate their voices in museum spaces by making connections with museum spaces in the motherland.
For my service project, I plan to present at the annual Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of Minnesota in April 2020. The conference is sponsored by Global Studies and all of the language and literature departments (Asian Languages and Literatures, Spanish & Portuguese Studies, French & Italian Studies, and German, Scandinavian, and Dutch). I will be working with D*** who is the Global Studies *** and takes part in organizing this event. She can be contacted at ******.
My target population is undergraduate students in the College of Liberal Arts, which is where all the attending departments are housed. I will be doing a presentation discussing my study abroad experience as a student of color in a non-traditional location. I will talk about financial scholarships and introduce opportunities like the Gilman Scholarship. Overall, I have three goals for my project. First, I want to diversify the study abroad narrative by representing women of color abroad. Second, I want to feed motivation into the idea of studying abroad by highlighting the opportunities for disadvantaged students to fund that financial gap. Thirdly, I want to become a contact and resource for students who would need advice on future study abroad ventures.
I plan to have three phases in my presentation. First, I want to share my personal and academic story and how it relates to my experience. Then, I plan to share the resources I chose to finance my program while introducing the Gilman Scholarship. Lastly, I would share my program through pictures, videos, and biographies of the people I plan to meet while in Kenya. In all, I decided on this service project proposal because I want to be the example I wish I had in my study abroad journey.
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