Training Students to Win Scholarly Awards

In the year 2007, Cornell had one Carnegie Junior fellow, three Goldwater scholars, one Luce scholar, one Marshall scholar, one Rhodes scholar and one Udall scholar. How do students obtain such prestigious awards? It may be through the help of each college’s individual fellowship representatives. In recent years, fellowship advising has become a more demanding field and has spread well beyond its origins of only Ivy League institutions. In fact, the National Association of Fellowship Advisers has reported 300 members since beginning ten years ago.

What is a fellowship adviser? Simply put, they are advisers on college campuses who help students to research, apply for, and win postgraduate scholarships. The problem is that many students do not realize they would ever be eligible for one of these seemingly unattainable scholarships. Paul A. Harris [4], the new fellowship adviser of Auburn University, describes the qualities he looks for in a scholar applicant: major, GPA, research, and extracurricular activities. As a result of Harris’ efforts, Auburn has a Rhodes scholar for the first time since 1980. On the same note, winners of fellowships are coming from colleges that have never before been compared to those from which most winners have traditionally haled, such as Harvard and Yale. Obviously, this raises the reputation of Auburn in the minds of students, donors, and others across the country. For this reason, colleges want fellowship advisers to seek the most students possible to be candidates for fellowships. But how far is a fellowship adviser willing to go to ensure victory for students?

A major problem in the rapidly growing field is that advisers are overstepping their boundaries in the amount of work they do to prepare students to be top scholarship candidates. Advisers are meant to help the student with essays, letters of recommendation, and preparations for finalist events. Also, if a student does not win, advisers help plan alternate postgraduate paths. As competition has constantly increased, advisers have violated the rules that explicitly state that applications must be solely the work of the individual. Therefore, some programs, such as the Rhodes Trust, have put their applications online so that only students can log on to the websites and view the applications. By doing this, advisers cannot make changes to essays or letters of recommendation, which some have been known to do to increase a student’s chances of winning.

Postgraduate fellowships are interesting alternatives for seniors who are unsure about immediately stepping into the career world. With the rise of fellowship advisers at colleges across the country, it remains to be seen if Cornell and other Ivy League schools will remain as the universities with the most scholars, or if other universities will shine through.