Only 25 days until I get on the plane.  It was only 12 months ago that I was contemplating applying for the fellowship.

Chateaubriand Fellowship is french equivalent of the Fulbright Scholarships.  U.S. graduate students are encouraged to propose research that is a collaboration between U.S. and French universities.  They provide the recipient airfare and a stipend to cover the costs of living in France.  Last year at this time I was wavering about putting in the time to create an application that was due by the beginning of February.  I did not have any contacts within french universities, nor any idea for a project.

I searched through the set of journal articles I had been reading for my research.  I found a couple  laboratories in France in those articles.  I found the authors email address and wrote a letter to them outlining my current research and asking if they would be interested in putting together an application on short notice.  I sent it off not thinking they would even respond.  To my surprise, they thought there could be a good synergy between our research ideas.   I quickly formulated a short description of the research idea we would pursue and began to collect all of the additional materials and contacted a number of people to write recommendations.

Needless to say, I got it all together even though I was collecting information from two continents.  I finished my submission not thinking that I would have a chance at being awarded a fellowship.  But,  what I did not know was that I had randomly picked a laboratory at one of the most prestigious universities in France and that the head of the department has over 250 peer reviewed articles published.  I was planning on attending a conference in Barcelona, Spain in the spring and wanted to extend my visit to Europe by heading to Lyon to meet the people I had been communicating with via email.

I was one of two grad students in our lab that put together applications and we think there were at least 500 applicants this year.  The other grad student received an email in the early spring thanking her for applying, but that she was not selected.  I kept waiting for mine to arrive, but after a couple of weeks I thought maybe I had made it past the first round.  April rolled around and I had the trip to all arranged.  I took the train from Barcelona to Lyon.  The french lab paid for my train and room.  I stayed in a nice little apartment just a few blocks from the lab.  I was able to spend 3 days meeting people, giving a talk about my research, and touring the city.  We discussed different possible ideas and projects.  But, we still had not heard anything about the fellowship.  We made plans to try to create a collaboration even if the fellowship did not materialize.  I returned to the U.S. on April 29th and only a couple days later on May 3rd I received the notification of being a 2012-2013 recipient.