Theme Music (00:01):

Please listen carefully.

Taylor Pardue (00:01):

Welcome to the NC State Philanthropy Podcast, telling the world how we Think and Do through the support of our friends, alumni and more. I’m your host, Taylor Pardue.

(00:18)
On this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Courtney Hughes, director of the University Fellowships Office, to talk about how it helps NC State students and alumni further their educations.

(00:32)
Thanks so much for joining us today, Courtney. To kick things off, just tell listeners a little bit about yourself and what first brought you to NC State.

Courtney Hughes (00:51):

Sure, absolutely. So, I’m the director of the University Fellowships Office here, and this is currently my 17th year in fellowship advising.

(01:00)
Prior to that, I worked at New College of Florida for 10 years doing fellowship advising and student success, and had gotten to the point where I’d pretty much reached what I wanted to do. It was a small institution, undergraduate, and it was time to kind of take on a new adventure. And at the time, I had said to my husband, “You don’t need a fellowship advisor that often. You usually have one or two on campus. So,” I said, “this job search could take six months or it could take six years. I don’t really know, so I’m going to start it.”

(01:28)
And at the time we had two small kids, a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, and I said, “In the in-between, we just continue to live our lives.” And I happened to be looking online, and NC State had just posted a position for a graduate fellowship advisor. So, I interviewed for the job and got it, was really excited about it. And the day I started, in 2019, I found out that the undergraduate fellowship director was resigning.

Taylor Pardue (01:54):

Oh no.

Courtney Hughes (01:55):

And so, I was now the only person on NC State’s campus who knew anything about fellowship advising. And so, just naturally over the next year and a half, sort of took on the role of both undergraduate and graduate advisor, and eventually we came to the conclusion that we should just have one big combined office. And so, in 2020, the University Fellowships Office was founded, and it blended the undergraduate fellowship advising with graduate advising. And we also work with alums until they are at a different institution. And so, it’s a big job. It’s myself and our assistant director, Dr. Kristen Hetrick, and we serve all of our students. So, it’s been an adventure. We certainly had some bumps along the way trying to decide how and when and ways to reach students. We’ve moved our office a few times, but I think we found a really great rhythm in making sure that we’re serving students.

(02:48)
And along the way, I got my doctorate from UNCW — go Seahawks — in higher education leadership. And so, that’s been an exciting part of this, too, to not only be advising students on how to find funding and how to balance all of these things, but then also to be going through it with them and sort of figuring out how to balance all of that as well. I appreciate that the students went on that adventure with me also, but it worked out really well. There’s a lot of awards that we administer that not only are open to graduating seniors, but the same award might be open for graduate students as well. So, it just made a lot of sense to make sure we were in one office using one type of advising strategy as opposed to trying to bridge that gap with two separate offices.

Taylor Pardue (03:33):

So, tell me, if listeners don’t already know about University Fellowships Office, what does this new joint office, what does it do and how does it operate?

Courtney Hughes (03:41):

Yeah, absolutely. So, we report to both the Graduate School and DASA, so that makes it easier for us to sort of reach as many students as we can. And our job really, it sounds silly, is to provide opportunities for students to do “a thing.” And I know it’s super-vague, and it’s meant to be super-vague. There are thousands of fellowship opportunities, and so, when we say “fellowships,” we’re talking about external funding. We don’t administer any NC State funding, but we do help connect students to it. So, our job is really to meet with students to find out what they’re interested in doing, whether it’s going to graduate school, whether it’s helping with tuition payment, whether it is doing an opportunity — something like a Fulbright, where you would go and do research for a year in another country or teach English overseas. Some of the money is for research funding that they might want to do, whether it’s undergraduate- or graduate-related.

(04:36)
Sometimes, it’s just exploring opportunities and talking with students to find out what they want to do and how we can maybe help them get there. So, once we identify an opportunity for students, then we are there beginning, middle and end. So, we help them with advising in terms of what should go into the application. We also help them with writing essays, both content and copy editing. So, that is really what takes up the bulk of our time is meeting with students, learning about them, helping them make sure that the right information’s getting into the application. For some awards, they do require an institutional nomination, meaning we can only nominate a certain number of students. We are also the institutional nomination office.

Courtney Hughes (05:15):

So, for some of the larger awards, we work closely with the chancellor’s office if it requires a chancellor-level nomination, if you will. We work with his office to be sure that if he wants to meet with the students prior to submitting a nomination letter that he does. In the past, for any of our super-prestigious awards, the chancellor has met with our nominees prior to submitting so that he can get to know them a little bit more. If it doesn’t require nomination, though, that doesn’t mean that we don’t work with our students, and we definitely publicize when they get the awesome awards that they get. But we also help with letters of recommendation. I think that’s a piece that sometimes gets lost in the mix. There’s a right way and a wrong way to ask for a letter of recommendation. So, we work with our students to be sure that they give enough time; that when they ask for the letter of recommendation that they’re attaching a CV or a draft of their statement so that the faculty member or the writer knows what they’re talking about. And I also encourage students to give them some guardrails. “So, in addition to anything else you’d like to write, if you could talk about these two or three specific things, that would be awesome.”

(06:20)
And it ensures that letters are really strong, but it also ensures that they’re different. A lot of times, if you ask for three letters of recommendation, you’re going to get three really good letters, but they might say almost the exact same thing if you don’t sort of give them a heading. And we’ve found that it’s really helpful for getting letters that are diverse, that are rich and robust, but it also makes it a little easier for the writer because they don’t have to think quite as hard because you’ve given them some sort of runway to land on. So, that’s part of our job, but we’re also there just to support students. Not every student that we meet with is going to apply to something. So, we like to think of ourselves as a spoke on the wheel of resources at NC State. So, I might meet with a student, and we will decide together that the thing that they were looking forward to applying to maybe isn’t the right fit right now, but it’s very obvious to me that their career trajectory is really exciting, awesome. But they really do need to talk to somebody in the career development center so that they have a better understanding what it’s going to take to get there.

(07:21)
So, we’ll connect them there. For other students, it’s just learning what options might be available. I always tell students, “Any time now is a good time to look for awards.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a first-year undergraduate or a second-year Ph.D. candidate, because present-you is going to do the work that future-you will be really happy that somebody looked into. And so, you’ll never miss an opportunity if you go ahead and look for it early. And the hardest part with fellowship advising really is the timeline. We can have very lucrative awards, but they’re not fast money. A typical timeline, and I tell students this all the time, “If you stay on this timeline, are there exceptions? Of course. But if you stay with this timeline in mind, you won’t miss anything.

(08:07)
From time of, sort of, discovery, if you will — we’ll say that usually happens in summer, when things open — from then you work on it all summer with us. Most awards are due in October and November. They go into a review process in the winter and early spring, and then you find out in spring if you get that money in fall. So, students that we worked with in summer 2025 are hoping for funded opportunities in fall 2026. So, that means a lot of forward-thinking, making decisions about fellowships when you maybe don’t have a decision about anything else. And that’s okay. And we work with students to tailor the timeline to their availability. So, we have some students who are going to apply for three or four awards. That’s a lot of writing, it’s a lot of reflection, it’s a lot of brain bandwidth, and they’re also usually in class and doing all of those things. And some of them are also applying to graduate school. So, it’s our job to make sure we’re also not burning anybody out and really making a timeline that’s manageable for students in addition to all of the other things that they’re juggling.

Taylor Pardue (09:15):

Several questions, but let me geek out first. As a writer, of course, I’m fascinated by that. Talk about how you go about helping prospects write these applications and everything.

Courtney Hughes (09:26):

Yeah. It’s tough and it’s difficult and it’s definitely not one size fits all. The most important thing is helping students understand how to read a proposal, because it’s a different style of comprehension than anything else. And so, the best way to do that is, number one, look at the mission and value statement of whatever organization you’re applying to. If it’s the National Science Foundation, go read their mission statement. If it’s Fulbright, go read their mission statement. Look into the history of the program, figure out why they created this award so that when you read a prompt that says, “Tell us why you think you’re going to be a good fit for this program?,” you’re reading that prompt full well knowing that they are looking for the next generation of diplomats or their main goal is to support research in this specific area so that when you’re answering these questions, you’re really tailoring it specifically to what those reviewers are looking for. In addition, I think that the reason we tell students to look early and often is because the writing part is the thing that takes the longest, and that’s the hardest sometimes for students to understand. It’s not a lab report; it’s not a book report; it’s sometimes not an analytical piece, either. It’s usually a personal statement, which everybody hates to write. No one likes to talk about themselves. I call it job security.

(10:51)
So, really sitting down with that student and getting them to just start writing that first draft is always the hardest. And then what we try and do is an active reading style assessment. And so, we’ll, at least in my case, and Kristen and I pretty much approach things similarly, but we can go in and change sentences, but that’s not teaching anybody what we’re talking about here. And so, whether it’s through a Google Doc, whether it’s track changes, whether it’s having a meeting with the student and reading through actively when we get to a piece, “OK, why did you put this in here? What now? Tell me more. This doesn’t make sense.” And so, helping students think through where things were going well and maybe they were starting to stray a little bit from the prompt.

(11:41)
So, that’s one approach that we do. A lot of it, too, is just going back and forth with something like Fulbright, which is one of our more popular awards that students apply to. We had 31 applicants this past year, and so, we begin that process in April. It’s due in October, and so the bulk of the writing for students happens over the summer, and some of those students will be at draft number 11 and 12 by the time they get there. Now, is every draft an overhaul? Not usually, but it can be rather tedious, and there’s a reason for that. You have one page to get across all of this 21 years of history or more, and it can be difficult to get it in there while keeping it compelling while keeping the narrative moving. This style of writing is not a comprehensive litany of things; it’s a very carefully curated snapshot of what we want those reviewers to know about that student. That’s a challenge for all of us.

(12:42)
So, for things like Fulbright, we also have campus interviews, which are required of Fulbright, but we use them as active reading sessions with the student, and it’s a feedback session, essentially. So, it’s usually myself or my colleague, Dr. Hetrick, and two volunteers that are either faculty or staff that are usually knowledgeable about that region or the type of award the student is applying to. And we spend an hour with them going over the materials that they submitted, talking to them about places we think it might be able to be strengthened by that point. As the editors, we have tunnel vision, so we are pretty useless at that point because we’ve been reading that same essay for seven months now. So, I am filling in all these gaps in my brain because I’ve been working with this student for so long. So, we have the bonus of having those volunteers that haven’t been looking at it that can say, “Hey, this research project sounds really, really interesting, but there’s a gap between what you say is your stated goal and then the steps that you’re going to take to get there. In my mind, we covered that, but now going back and looking at it through their eyes, fresher eyes, you can see that.

(13:52)
And so, we work with those students to make sure all of those adjustments are made before we submit. So, it’s a lot. It’s a lengthy process. It takes a lot of time, but I find that students, whether it’s NC State students or students from my previous position, will reach back out and say, whether they’re working on a dissertation or a master’s thesis or applying for something else. I had a student recently who I worked with in, I’m going to date myself here, 2011, I think, and she and I are still close, and she sent me a message the other day that she was working on a grant and she could just hear my head, or my words in the back of her head. She was like, “I hear your voice, and it just keeps telling me, ‘Is the sentence doing anything to move a narrative along?‘’ And so, you make an impact, it makes an impression, and hopefully, I like to remind students, we have you doing this here, doing it this way because we are your safety net right now, and we want you to have that safety net when you leave and go off to do other things. You might not have that same net, and we want to give you the tools that you need to be successful in those other areas.

Taylor Pardue (14:59):

Well, you didn’t age yourself, but I think that’s a wonderful anecdote to prove your point that you could make the changes on your own as an editor, but to teach the student, or teach the applicant, what they need to do differently, that way it sticks with them. That is a extra bonus on top of the fellowship itself.

Courtney Hughes (15:18):

Absolutely. Yeah. I actually just met with a student yesterday. So, with one of the awards that we administer, we have a limited number of nominations, and so it’s the Goldwater Scholarship. It’s an undergraduate STEM award. As you can imagine at a school like NC State, we have more than four qualified students who are doing amazing things in the STEM field. So, we have an internal competition for that award, and I have a committee that looks at the internal applicants that submit their applications to apply for a nomination. And we had 15 applicants this year for four spots, and one of the areas that I’m really committed to is if we have students who go through an internal nomination process, we make them do the whole application. They have to write a research proposal, they have to submit three letters of recommendation. We want the full application so we can make a really informed choice. But when I started, one of the things that I really felt committed to was that any student who goes through an internal process will have a feedback session with me when we’re done, whether or not they get the nomination.

(16:22)
Just yesterday, I was meeting with a student who did not get the nomination, went through this whole process, is a junior, is going to be applying to graduate school. And so, when I met with him, I said, “Hey, you did really strong work. We just had a lot of really strong applicants. There are some areas I think you can improve on, especially as you’re looking ahead to graduate school. These are things that could stand in your way of being even more successful than I know you’re going to be.” And we spent about 20 minutes just going through some areas that could use some strengthening. And at the end of the session, he said that he was just so grateful, it was so helpful. He really appreciated the feedback. And he said, “It’s so infrequent that when you get a no or a rejection, you actually get to hear why.” And that’s the part that’s the most important piece from both my perspective and Kristen’s perspective is, you will be told no way more than you’re going to get a yes, whether it is a fellowship, whether it’s a scholarship, whether it’s graduate school, job market.

Taylor Pardue (17:24):

Job.

Courtney Hughes (17:24):

And so infrequently do you ever find out why. And so, if there are ways that we can teach students about the process and about learning from those mistakes and growing through those mistakes, then … Obviously, we want the awards. I want to win, but to me, the most important part is that we are producing students who can go out and replicate this in a way that is beneficial to them and not traumatic for them because no’s are the worst, but there’s usually a reason for it, and if we can help students kind of see through that, I think we’re doing the best we can.

Taylor Pardue (18:00):

You’ve mentioned two things that I wanted to highlight. So, first off, who can apply for these? You’ve mentioned undergraduates, graduates, alumni even, and then, also, is it primarily a merit-based fellowship process? Is this more of a financial need? It sounds like these fellowships can really, like you said, “The thing.”

Courtney Hughes (18:19):

“The thing.”

Theme Music (18:21):

“The person,” too. It really fits a lot of different needs.

Courtney Hughes (18:23):

Absolutely. If there was one phrase that I could get tattooed across my forehead as a fellowship advisor, and I know all of my fellow fellowship advisors would agree with me, it’s the phrase, “It depends.” It totally depends. It truly is open to everyone. I will die on the hill that if you are curious and you want to know more about it, then you’re the person who should be meeting with us. And does that mean every student that we meet with, like I said, is going to do it? Probably not, but there are so many opportunities. Undergraduate. Graduate. I say alumni because we do have students every year that go off into the world and do great things and then decide for whatever reason maybe they want to teach English for a year in another country. It really is completely dependent upon the type of award you’re looking for. Eligibility is something that is really critical when you’re looking at fellowships. So, some awards do have a gatekeep on number of years you’ve been out from undergraduate or graduate. Some have a stop-gap on the level of degree you have, but it’s all hit or miss, and it’s all scattershot. When it comes to need versus merit, it’s the same thing.

(19:38)
Most awards have some component of both, but not all. So, some of them focus more on one versus the other, and I always look at it as like a weighted thing. So, for some awards, merit is going to be a lot more important than financial need. There are some awards that don’t care about your financial aid. There are other awards that care greatly about your financial circumstances, and usually, in those cases, merit is a little less important because they recognize that if you have severe need or extreme circumstances, it’s unlikely that you’re able to do all the things as well. And so, that can be something that factors into the types of awards that we encourage specific students to look into, but really the world’s your oyster. We can pretty much find something for most students who are interested in doing it. Whether or not they are interested in that specific award because of maybe some of the stipulations in it or the timing of the award is a different story. Maybe the commitments to it. There are some awards that require you do a summer internship with them. For students who maybe have already committed to summer research through a different program, they’re not eligible anymore, they can’t give that up, but for most things, it’s pretty flexible.

Taylor Pardue (20:52):

Well, I think that’s so important, too. You mentioned that you also help the students and the applicants and everyone, you help find them fitting fellowships as well. It’s not just, “We will help you in your path,” but, “We will help you find that path as well.”

Courtney Hughes (21:05):

Absolutely. The majority of students come to us with no idea what they want to do. Some will find us and say, “I found you because my faculty advisor or my advisor told me I need to come talk to you. I don’t know what you do. I don’t know why I’m talking to you. They just told me I need to come talk to you.” That’s always fun. That’s like a grab bag for all of us. It’s like a little mystery, but for the most part, students come to us and say, “I know I want to do something like X. Is there a way I can do that and have funding for it?” For other students, when they come to us, though. “We did an info session. You said if I was curious, I should come now. Here I am.” And then it’s more about a getting-to-know-you conversation; lot of, “Tell me more about what you’re studying. What do you want to do?” That stresses everybody out. I have to ask the question, but the stress level, you can watch it rise. Doesn’t matter what type of student I’m working with; if I ask, like, a sophomore, “Tell me your long-term plans.” They pale. “I don’t know. I’m only a sophomore.”

(22:08)
Heaven help me. When I ask a graduating senior what their long-term plans are, the panic is real. I don’t know if doctoral candidates are any better, because they’re usually in the thick of it at that point.

Taylor Pardue (22:19):

That’s true, yeah.

Courtney Hughes (22:20):

So, they’re just like, “My long-term plan is, make sure I graduate with a completed dissertation.” And until I did my own, I was going to say, until I went through my own doctoral journey, I did not understand that visceral reaction, but I totally get it now. But in those cases, it’s, “Tell me more about all of this. What are you interested in doing?” And through that, you start to learn more about what motivates that person, even if it’s ideal career, “If you could pick anything you wanted to do …?” And depending on what they say can sometimes dictate, “Well, wow, you’re going to need to get some research funding to be able to do that.” Or for students who are interested in a career in politics or international relations, there are a lot of opportunities, whether it is international or domestic, whether it is post-bacc or in later years of being an adult.

(23:17)
There are opportunities that you can look into. Kristen and I have been doing this a really long time, so I would say confidently the top 50 awards, I can rattle off pretty well when I’m working with a student to say, “Oh, you should apply to this. You should apply to this. Have you thought about this?” But like I said, there’s thousands of awards, so we also have some open-source databases that we will point students toward. If anybody listening takes nothing else away from this, do not Google “fellowships.” You will not get usable results.

Taylor Pardue (23:47):

Oh my goodness. That’s a good point.

Courtney Hughes (23:49):

Our open-source databases are not behind a firewall, so you can just click on our website and go look at the resources that are available. That’s another area I think we often overlook as educators. Yes, I can help with writing. Yes, I can help you think through letters of recommendation But you also need to be able to look through these things yourself and think about how to look for that funding. For instance, students who are in really technical STEM fields, do not use your technical keywords. “Spectrometry” or “spectroscopy” or “CRISPR.” I am a humanist; this is not my area of expertise, but you don’t use your super-technical terms because the people who are writing the proposals are people like me who are writers and not necessarily embedded in your biomedical engineering field. So, helping students learn how to go to a higher umbrella within their field or what words within their research might resonate. Learning how to do that is a lifelong skill because, when you leave here, you’re going to be asked to look up things, whether it’s a grant, even in a job setting. Understanding how to explain what you’re doing at a level that is accessible so that you can not only talk to people about it but also look for funding for it is something I think is really important.

Taylor Pardue (25:05):

Yeah. I’m just so glad your office works with alumni as well. It’s the perfect manifestation of that Wolfpack ethos of once you’ve joined the Pack, you’re Wolfpack forever, that kind of thing. So, I think that’s a great way to help them into their careers as well.

Courtney Hughes (25:19):

Absolutely. We also have found that students that engage with us when they’re here and know that we are able to help as alums come back and help us with things like Fulbright interviews. They sit on our committees and help review other student applicants. They are willing to talk to students that might be applying for similar awards that they actually got.

Taylor Pardue (25:40):

Oh, nice.

Courtney Hughes (25:41):

They are always happy to talk to our students. They usually say the same thing that we say, but somehow hearing it from a peer makes it better, and I really appreciate that because that’s time that they did not have to give back, and they do it willingly and enthusiastically, and it’s made a big difference in terms of ensuring that our students see that connection. It also helps for students who maybe are graduating seniors, maybe are coming to the end of their master’s program and didn’t know we existed and now maybe some of the opportunities they thought they wanted to apply to or didn’t even know they could apply to have gone because they’re thinking they’re losing this service. And in reality, I always remind those students, we are your office. We are still here. Students who are alums get the same level of service that students who are enrolled. Being able to take that pressure off of the student, that feels really good because, usually in those situations, they’ve got enough going on, they’re stressed out about enough, and trying to throw an application together on the fly is maybe not the best plan, but knowing that they can do it in the next cycle with the same level of help, they’ll just have to be adulting at the same time, is something that we’re really, really passionate about.

(26:56)
Students often ask me, “What can I do to stand out? What makes me competitive?” Again, it depends, but being authentic and having a point of view and having an intentionality to whatever it is you’re talking about, whether it’s your career trajectory, your research, why you’re passionate about what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. There’s a misconception I think particularly in the personal statement realm, that you need some sort of trauma that you can talk about to make a compelling statement. You really don’t. You just need to tell us, how did you get here? What did you do? What choices did you make? And for some students, those choices were I was doing something and I did not like it, so I hard pivoted and now I’m here. That’s compelling. We’ve all been there. That’s one of the pieces I think that we spend a lot of time on is that reflecting with students and really being an unbiased party member in their life to say, whoa, that’s super interesting. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Most students are like, I didn’t think that was so interesting. But yeah, I can definitely tell you about coming to college as a American or an English lit major, taking one math class and saying, Hey, I’m actually really good at this. I think I’m just going to change my major to mathematics.

Taylor Pardue (28:20):

And flip side, too, like we’ve mentioned the STEM, but I’m glad like you mentioned politics and different things. These fellowships. Truly, “the thing.” It could be anything.

Courtney Hughes (28:27):

It can be anything.

Taylor Pardue (28:29):

It can be on the English side as well, so.

Courtney Hughes (28:30):

It can be. The humanities and social sciences are underfunded, for sure. Definitely looking across the board and certainly with how funding currently is right now, most of the funding that students are looking to apply to does have a federal component, and I definitely think that private funding is going to become more and more important as students find other wells drying up. But that doesn’t mean we won’t keep looking, and even if things seem uncertain, if an application is open, we are telling students, you should be applying to it.

(29:02)
Ignore the noise and focus on the thing, but we also look to other sources of funding so that students can continue to do the cool things that they’re doing, because nothing is worse than finding a student who has this really great idea, was really excited to apply to something, and to find out that maybe eligibility has changed or that the funding source is no longer funding that specific type of award. So, we certainly, at that point, partner with other agencies both on campus and off campus to try and find students other opportunities and other resources.

Taylor Pardue (29:38):

You mentioned how a lot of these are external, if not federally funded, and/or federally funded. Obviously, listeners to this podcast are first and foremost NC State-related in some way. How can they play a part in your mission? And then, also, you mentioned former recipients coming back and talking. Talk a little bit about, maybe even beyond the monetary, how can they get involved and really play a part in your office’s role?

Courtney Hughes (30:02):

Absolutely. We are always looking for volunteers who are interested in whether it’s being a formal part of a committee, whether it’s being a connection to a student who is interested in a specific area. There are alums who have awards who maybe applied for things, who didn’t apply but had jobs or other internships or research positions, maybe in another country or in a lab here in the states, that have valuable resources that they can share beyond just their financial component. Time is really important. As I mentioned, we, with working with all of our students, sometimes we find that we don’t have as much time as we wish we did to dedicate to advising students or talk to them about these opportunities. And in those situations, we do reach out to those alums that have stayed in contact with our office to say, “I, really, talk to this student about getting their degree at Edinburgh, but you are currently there. Can you talk to the student about what it’s like to live there, what they need to know about the university?”

(31:02)
So, even if they don’t get the award they’re applying to, they’re still applying to graduate school there, and I really want them to understand what it’s like to be in that place. So, that’s really an important piece of it in terms of how donors can help financially, definitely. We have a lot of buckets on campus, and I think finding an area that you’re really interested in, whether it’s study abroad, whether it’s a specific department college, whether it’s a specific initiative or event, finding out what other opportunities are available in and around that I think is really important because even if they don’t necessarily need donors for an event, there’s usually other things that lead up to it.

(31:44)
Office of Undergraduate Research is another area where we could always use more donors, especially as other funding sources start to dwindle. So, students who engage in undergraduate research, and the Office of Undergraduate Research does an amazing job at making sure that it’s not just STEM students that have opportunities for research, it’s truly all disciplines. Those students tend to go on and be better applicants for everything — jobs, graduate school, other fellowships, scholarships. So, anything we can do to help fund those kinds of opportunities, whether it’s research, whether it’s Alternative Spring Breaks, whether it’s service projects, these are the type of enrichment activities that, while it’s not directly a fellowship, it is going to contribute to our students being more successful in those competitions because of it.

Taylor Pardue (32:35):

That’s a great point. I mean, there’s so much we do in the classroom or in the lab, but these learning experiences beyond that, just NC State is so full of opportunities. I love to hear that.

Courtney Hughes (32:45):

Absolutely, and sometimes that’s the hardest part for students when I meet with them is looking through their résumé. They have these leadership positions, they’ve done all these cool travel opportunities, they’ve done research. Sometimes, it’s actually really hard to get it all in an application, but that’s an embarrassment of riches that I’m happy to take.

Taylor Pardue (33:03):

There you go.

Courtney Hughes (33:05):

One of the things that we try and impress upon people is, I cannot guarantee you a fellowship. We have a couple guarantees that we always joke about. I can’t guarantee you a fellowship, and I can’t guarantee that we are going to find the most perfect fit for you, but I can guarantee that if you work with us, what you submit will be the best it can possibly be at that time. I can guarantee that if you don’t get the award, we will be bummed with you, and then we will go back to the drawing board and try again. And I can also guarantee students, I won’t let you apply for something that I don’t think you have a reasonable chance of getting.

Taylor Pardue (33:39):

To waste the months of writing.

Courtney Hughes (33:40):

Yeah. Expectation management’s important. Just like we were saying earlier.

Taylor Pardue (33:45):

The confidence boost.

Courtney Hughes (33:46):

The confidence boost. If I know you’re not a good fit for this award, why on earth would I let you waste all of your time and everybody else’s?

Taylor Pardue (33:52):

Not for that much time, yeah. It’s not like you’re doing it in a day or …

Courtney Hughes (33:54):

Absolutely.

Taylor Pardue (33:54):

… a couple paragraphs.

Courtney Hughes (33:55):

That can sometimes be a hard conversation, but I’ve really, I can honestly say I’ve never had a student angry with me for saying, “Hey, I don’t think this is the right fit.” And if they don’t need an institutional nomination, if they’re really committed to applying, even after I’ve said, “I don’t think this is the right fit,” I’ll still work with them. I’m not going to kick you out. I just want you to know that …

Taylor Pardue (34:18):

They may get it, yeah. but still.

Courtney Hughes (34:18):

Yeah, I just want you to know that there might be other awards that deserve your time a little bit more. But in the end, it’s up to the student, and we just want to try and help them navigate that.

Taylor Pardue (34:28):

Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all this information and just, really, thank you for your office and all the work that you do.

Courtney Hughes (34:35):

Absolutely. Thank you for having me, and hopefully anybody who is listening knows we exist now and we are happy to help students, alums, and we’re also happy to answer any questions that anybody might have about what this process looks like.

Taylor Pardue (34:53):

To learn more about the University Fellowships Office, please visit go.ncsu.edu/fellowship. If you’d like to hear even more stories of Wolfpack success, please subscribe to the NC State Philanthropy Podcast today via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Podbean. Please leave a comment and rating as well to let us know how we’re doing.

(35:15)
Thanks for listening, and as always, go Pack.