FSU Graduate Student Becomes First Fiction Writer to Win Woodrow Wilson Award

  • Misha Rai Headshot
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Three words: apply, apply, apply. Any funding that your work may be remotely suited for is worth applying to. Consider the kind of national prestige these awards bring not only to FSU or your department but to you, apart from how they help the work you are doing. This is the kind of prestige that puts a scholar, researcher, or writer on the radar of publishers and honestly helps land tenure track jobs.

The open-mindedness, encouragement, and support of the Office of Graduate Fellowships and Awards (OGFA) helped me tremendously during the application process. I found out about the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship two weeks before the application was due but because of personal reasons I couldn’t begin work on it for another week. When I explained to the staff at OGFA my situation, although at first cautious due to the short time frame for submission, they encouraged and helped me with every aspect of my application material whether it was discussing how best to approach application questions or reading my project proposal and personal statement. Just having OGFA in my corner made all the difference in what could have otherwise been a daunting and rather lonely process.