Episode 121: Helping Huskies Earn Scholarships and Fellowships

It’s the second week of classes on all of UConn campuses and our guest on this week’s UConn 360 podcast is busier than ever. Vin Moscardelli is the director of the Office of National Scholarships & Fellowships, which helps identify students for such honors as the Rhodes, Fulbright, Truman and Udall programs. Moscaredelli’s office guides students through the application process and has some great stories about how some scholars have found out they are winners.  Moscardelli also tells us about his background and his time as a political science professor and what that is like during this time of political division.

Link to Episode 121 at Podbean

Transcript

Mike: We are very pleased to be joined by Vinn Moscardelli on the UConn 360 Podcast today. Vin has a very interesting and very important job here at UConn. He’s the director of the Office of National Scholarships and Fellowships, which is known as ONSF here at UConn.

Vin came to UConn in 2008 and has been in his present position since 2016. He has a political science faculty background, has a doctorate from Emory University in Atlanta. And, he himself has held a national scholarship and fellowship. He was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow back in his student days.

So, Vin, tell us about your position here at UConn and also the office and some of the people that you oversee and what the mission and goals of it are.

Vin: So, I am Vin Moscardelli and I do direct the Office of National Scholarships and Fellowships. We’re the office that works with students who competing for nationally competitive awards. Some of which folks have probably heard of, things like the Fulbright or maybe the Rhodes.

What’s interesting about our office is that this office actually exists at a lot of universities, but it’s often housed in like an honors program or an honors we’re part of enrichment programs, which means that we serve the entire university community. All graduate students and undergraduates and students at all of the campuses as well.

Right now we have two people. on our staff. Our assistant director is Dr. Michael Cunningham. Mike’s an engineer by training who then got his PhD in history. He had a Fulbright himself to Italy as a graduate student here at UConn, and so he’s our Fulbright program advisor and is doing amazing work as he begins that job.

He started actually last July after our previous assistant director, Luanne Saunders Canabay, retired. So it’s a really interesting time in the in the office. We used to have three people, and now we’re two. And so we’re really trying to figure out exactly how to do that work with two people going forward.

As you said, I direct the Office of National Scholarships and Fellowships, and we’re the office that works with students who are competing for nationally competitive awards, some of which you might have heard of, things like the Fulbright, things like the Rhodes.

Our job is to work with those students to help identify them, help make students aware of the opportunities that are available, to advise them, to help them with feedback on drafts of essays and applications and things like that, and really just more generally to build the fellowships culture here on campus.

Kelsie: Awesome. So, what is your educational background and how did you end up teaching at UConn?

Vin: So, it’s kind of an interesting story. I started my career as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts up in Amherst, but my wife got a job at UConn back in 2001. So at one point along the way, the opportunity to pursue something here at UConn became available and we pursued it.

And it was wonderful for us because we consolidated our, educational background. lives in a lot of way. So it’s really been nice to be part of the Storrs community. And then in about 2016, I had the opportunity to, explore, to pursue this position.

And I jumped on that opportunity. I was really pleased when it worked out.

Izzy: I always think it’s really unique when someone goes from a career like political science into your like position now, because it’s such a different, landscape, I imagine, from what you did before.

Vin: It is, you know, I had a taste of some of this back at UMass. I was a departmental honors coordinator for a department that had about 800 majors or so, and really got a lot of energy out of that work and really enjoyed working with the students. And at some point along the way it just became clear, you know, you reach a point in your life when you’re like, why should I be spending all my time on things that don’t give me energy when I have an opportunity to pursue something that would allow me to spend my days doing things that do give me energy?

And that’s the lesson we try to talk to our students about. as well. You know, find those things that really excite you, that really give you energy. And so I get to work with some extraordinary students, get to work with some of the most generous faculty, staff, and administrators on campus, and also get to sort of interact with folks in the community who are working in the various capacities that our students are interested in.

So it’s really just a fantastic way. I mean, there are parts of the old job I miss, there’s no doubt about it. but this is really fantastic work.

Izzy: Sounds like you have almost as good a job as me.

Vin: Almost.

Izzy: So, going back to the national scholarships and fellowships, there’s so many. How do you match students with their perfect scholarship?

Vin: Yeah, you’re right about that. In terms of the, there’s no single list of national scholarships and fellowships. There are databases that we encourage our students to look into, but there’s no single comprehensive list. So a lot of this really is. Trying to focus our efforts on ones that we believe are really valuable, ones that have been around for a long time.

But really, for us, the key is helping make students aware of just the opportunity that’s out there, and then to focus on fit. And that word you use is really important, right? It’s really all about fit for these awards. And so different foundations, different funding agencies are looking for different things.

Sometimes they’re looking for students who have this really enormous leadership profile. Other times they’re looking for folks who plan to aspire to be the next generation of great research scientists. It’s really all about. fit. And so we try to make these opportunities available to students, point them in the direction.

We promote particular opportunities, but really we try to get students to do a lot of this work. And then we work with them as they develop their applications. Because sometimes many of these require us as an office to nominate students. Sometimes there’s a limited number of nominations that we’re allowed and we’re the office that administers that.

Other times we can nominate as many people as we want or endorse as many people as we want, but we still have to go through that campus process.

Mike: Everybody’s heard of the Rhodes Scholarship, growing up, Bill Bradley, the Clintons, and whatnot, but tell us, besides the Rhodes, what are some of the other prominent scholarships out there, and how many total number of scholarships and fellowships does your office deal with?

Vin: Well, you’re right, Mike. The Rhodes is probably the one that’s been around for the longest and has the highest profile. But there are an almost infinite number of awards that are, that are out there. And again, that’s the reason we focus so much on fit for our students. But there are a few that we really do highlight. We tend to nominate students for the Marshall Scholarship, which is an opportunity for undergraduates and recent alumni to go to the UK to pursue a graduate degree. In fact, we have a student, Sarah Marcy, who’s actually in the UK right now at the Royal Academy of Music on a Marshall scholarship. She was UConn’s sixth Marshall Scholar and she was selected last year. The Fulbright is really the opportunity that we try to encourage the most students to do.

There are almost 2,000 Fulbright awards each year for students to either go abroad to do research or to pursue a degree or to teach English in another country. And so Fulbright is one. In fact, we were a top producing institution for Fulbright for the very first time ever just last year. So it’s one of the ones we really get excited about.

The Truman Scholarship is an opportunity for juniors who have, profiles in leadership and aspire to careers in public service. and then of course the Udall Scholarship is one that’s that we nominate students for as well, which is for students with leadership profiles who aspire to do important work in the field of either the environment or Native American public policy.

And I should also mention, there’s a whole series of awards for people who aspire to be research scientists, because we’re a research university. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is a $37,000 a year, three year commitment from the NSF to support a student during graduate school. We just found out about those the other day.

We had more of those than any other school in New England this year, which was really exciting. Any other public university in New England. And then, the Goldwater Scholarship, which is for sophomores and juniors who aspire to be research scientists. So those are ones where we have to nominate students or endorse them for just about all of those.

And so those are ones that we really spend a lot of our time working with students on.

Kelsie: Does a student ever come up to you and say that they want to apply to a scholarship or are you always reaching out to them?

Vin: So, in terms of how this gets started, students do often reach out to us directly. I think one of the other things we hope happens is we’re in the process of trying to build a really robust fellowships culture on campus. And so what we really want is for faculty to be referring students to us because what we’ve found over time is that when you reach out to a student and say, Hey, I was talking to Professor so and so and that person suggested that I reach out to you.

They thought you’d be a really good fit. Those students respond. Right. When we just send out a blanket email, I mean, I’ve got college age kids, I can tell you like email is not must read material every single morning. And so this makes our job really hard. You know, in some ways I like to joke that we are not marked trained as marketers.

We don’t have the tools available to us that marketing pros have. And yet part of our job is really being amateur marketers. We have to get the word out about these things. So it’s wonderful when students walk in the door. But I think our most reliable way of reaching of getting in touch with students is through our partners on campus. We have partners in the cultural centers. We have partners in academic departments. We have partners, in various offices around campus. But the Office of Sustainability and the staff over there have been wonderful and sort of encouraging students from, from their office to, to reach out to us and to pursue that.

That’s Wawa, who is our first Rhodes Scholar. Working with Walla was just a joy. She, sometimes I like to say it couldn’t happen to a nicer person.

I was thrilled that she got the opportunity to be UConn’s first Rhodes Scholar. so well deserved.  Met her as a sophomore and started working with her. She started applying for things. We worked a lot the summer between her sophomore and junior year to help her put together and really just in her case, articulate and pull together all of the things she was doing because that’s the remarkable thing about so many of these students.

They’re doing dozens of things. We think of her as somebody who’s really active in the environmental space. But she was also leading the charge along with one other student on food insecurity here on campus as an undergraduate. And then she was the vice president of the Student Government Association.

And she won the Voice like the UConn vote. Like she just had so many little things that she was doing and big things that she was doing. And so a lot of the work with her was helping her figure out how do you write about all of that? How do you decide what to focus on? And how do you? Articulate a vision of who you are as a person and as a scholar and as an activist and as a leader that is coherent, and that you can get across in the amount of characters that are available in some of these very, I mean they sound long, maybe it’s 2,000 words in some cases.

But when you’re doing talking about pulling your whole life together, that’s not a whole lot of characters.

Mike: If I’m a UConn freshman or sophomore, or even maybe a high school senior, and I become aware of these awards, what can I do to prepare myself to be eligible and perhaps win one someday?

Vin: So I used to give one answer to this question about how do we prepare students for these awards? And now I like to give two different answers, but they’re both focused on the same premise, which is for students to be successful in these competitions, they have to have a really clear sense of who they are, where they want to go, and how this particular award they’re applying for is going to help them reach that destination.

And that’s a really important kind of three part step. So if a student plans to be a research scientist and wants to win a Goldwater or an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship or something like that, Then they need to get in a lab. They need to start doing research right away. And they need to be thinking about the ways that they would demonstrate that they’re doing that research.

There are a lot of students on campus who are doing interesting work, but you have to be able to demonstrate it in, you know, in an essay. You have to be able to talk about the work that you’re doing, about how it reaches broader kind of populations. You have to ideally have some papers that you’ve either presented at conferences or posters or, published.

So for the research awards, that’s really the angle for the ones that focus more on things like leadership. I tell students, and again, this is the same idea, find the thing that you love, that you do. You can’t contort yourself to become a Rhodes Scholar. You have to be the best you, and then hope that that particular year that’s good enough because you’re never gonna win one of these awards when you go in an interview if you’re trying to be something you’re not. Because in all likelihood there’s somebody else in the pool that already is that, and the authentic person’s gonna win it over, over you. So, think about what are the ways where you can start moving the needle as a young person, because that’s what it takes. You know, when Rhodes got started, the vision was of the sort of traditional Renaissance man, this well rounded man in that instance, that they were looking for. I don’t think very many of these awards are looking for well rounded people anymore.

We joke that they’re looking for misshapen people, people with huge biceps, right? Like the one, they do one thing extraordinarily well. And even though they’re 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, they’re already moving the needle and making a difference in whatever the thing is that they care the most about. So if you want to be successful, find the thing you love, find the thing you care about the most.

Look around. You’re usually the kind of person who, when you look around, you see things that could be done better, and you feel compelled to then make them better. And those are the people that we have success with in these competitions.

Mike: You know, one of the things I’ve noticed, I’ve, I’ve written a lot of stories for UConn Today about the winners and these, these winners, I call them kids cause they all seem like kids to me, but, these students they’re not locked in the library at three o’clock in the morning. They’re not, they’re, they’re involved in community activities. They’re involved in charitable work, they have their causes, but they also appear to have. Some amount of fun on campus, too, and go to maybe a game or an artistic event or something like that. Talk about how people are well rounded and how important that is.

Vin: Yeah, you know, Mike, there’s not one profile. of a national scholarship winner. Again, some of it has to do with the particular award. There may be some folks who haven’t left the lab in three years. We’re winning gold medals, to be honest, right?

That’s the thing. But for a lot of the ones that we end up focusing on and celebrating things like the Rhodes or the Marshall or the Truman or the Udall, those students are out in the community. And in fact, one of the things we talk about You know, this is a pathology of leadership on campus, is that you really focus on the organization that you’re a part of and leading that, right?

But if you think about it, say you aspire to be the president of the Student Government Association. Well, that’s great, and you can do really neat work, but there’s a president of every student government association at every college and university in the country. That title, that role isn’t going to distinguish you in one of these competitions in any way, shape, or form. They care more about what you’re actually doing. And so these students are out there. What’s fun to talk to them about is that they’re out there in the world doing things, making a difference, engaging with lots of different people and they’re not just focusing on particular things. It’s really hard.

We have this amazing event here at UConn called Huskython. Most of the listeners are probably familiar with it. They raise an enormous amount of money. It demands an enormous amount of work from the students. Who are involved in it to make it happen and I’ll meet with students and I’ll say, so talk to me about your, your activism.

Talk to me about your community service and they’ll say, Oh, I did Huskython. I’m like, okay, great. How can we talk about that in a way that people from outside will understand what that looks like that will distinguish you from other students who are doing fundraisers at other campuses around the country.

So trying to figure out ways again of explaining the work you do. In a way that distinguishes you from other students, not just at UConn, because we get that, but beyond the campus and beyond the university system.

Kelsie: A student winning one of these awards must feel so rewarding for them. What’s your favorite story of reaction of a student when they found out they were a winner?

Vin: So when the students find out that they’ve won, it’s a really special moment because in many cases you’ve been working with them for a really long time and it’s, and sometimes they’ve had instances where they were not successful. Right? So that it’s really a kind of amazing moment. A lot of the foundations actually let me know first, so I get to be the one who either delivers the news or arranges it. And we’ve been pretty fortunate, in that a lot of our university presidents have been willing to, to help and to play along and to deliver this news.

Probably the funniest instance we had was when Tom Katsouleas was president, and he offered to let our two Truman scholar recipents from that year, that’s really rare thing, to have two in the same year.

So we got them into a conference call for, under the auspices of some other thing. They really didn’t know what was going on. That’s not always true because I’m not that good at keeping secrets. But anyway, they were on the screen and he says to them, I wanted to let you know I’ve already talked to Vin, we have one Truman Scholar this year.

And, of course, they’re both on the call, and they’ve both been nominated, and they were both finalists. They’ve both gone through the interview, and they start looking around, and you can see the color kind of dropping out of both of their faces, because they know that, I mean, he says, no, actually, we have two. You both won. But that moment, and so then, they’re both relieved and laughing, but also, like, still uncomfortable from the moment before, and it was really, we’ve got it on tape, and it was actually pretty funny to watch, but they were obviously thrilled, and it was a really great moment to have two of just 55 Truman scholars in the whole country coming from UConn that year.

Mike: We talk about basketball and athletics kind of being the front porch and enhancing the reputation of the university, but awards like this have to, have to have the same similar effect I would think.

Vin: So there are a lot of different ways that we can enhance the university’s reputation, and obviously winning basketball is one of those, but I do agree that these students are another avenue for promoting the amazing work that our faculty are doing, the amazing work that our students are doing, and just the remarkable community of support that we’ve got here at UConn.

You know as depending on the types of the award that you’re talking about, these students are going on to do pretty amazing things, and they’re becoming parts of networks, whether it’s Fulbright, Or Marshall or Truman or Rhodes that are really making things happen around the world. You know, I stay in touch with these students, going forward.

And so you talk about someone like Akshaya Chidababu who won a Truman and a Marshall and is finishing up in medical school right now, although she’s on a Fulbright to Tanzania at the moment. I mean, she’s out there really, you know, carrying that UConn banner forward, in so many ways and doing so many neat things.

Wawa is obviously really active. Her, her work in the environment. She’s created an organization called Black Girl Environmentalist that’s really become quite prominent. She’s presenting at South by Southwest. I saw a picture of her on Instagram the other day with Zendaya. So, I mean, you know, she’s just out there doing kind of remarkable work as well.

And folks, every time they introduce her, I’m like, she’s a Rhodes Scholar. She attended the University of Connecticut. It’s just, that’s the type of thing that we’re talking about here. And it works at a smaller level as well in the communities that aren’t around Connecticut and things like that.

So it’s really a, I think a fantastic way of promoting who we are, the types of students we have, and really the support that they have to be able to do great things at the University of Connecticut.

Mike: Your academic background, as I mentioned earlier, Congress, elections and political leadership without getting partisan in the last 20 or 25 years, how has teaching those areas to college students with the political landscape we have, how has that changed and what are the challenges of it?

Vinn: Teaching. American politics in particular, I think, has become really tough. I don’t envy my colleagues who continue to have to do it on a day to day basis. You know, I’m not really in the classroom much, although I will be teaching a class on forecasting the 2024 presidential election in the fall. I think it’s gotten really hard.

And I think for folks like me who really were trained to focus to teach and write about political institutions who care deeply about how democracy works, it’s been a really fascinating moment. It’s difficult. It was hard in the nineties in some ways because there’s a lot of these trends were first emerging, and I think that it’s gotten even tougher.

I’m not in the classroom every day anymore. And honestly, I probably don’t miss it too much in that particular way. It’s a really tough time to be doing that work.

Izzy: Well, it’s very obvious that your program has already had a ton of success. What would your hopes and dreams for the future of the program be?

Vin: So we’ve had a lot of success in recent years, particularly with some historic firsts. You know, our first Rhodes, our first Beinecke scholar, our first Schwarzman scholar, our first Scoville Peace Fellow we just found out yesterday actually. So we’re really having great luck with those. Our first time as a Fulbright top producing institution.

We want to build on those. We don’t want those to be the first and last. We want those to be the first of many. And the way we do that is by building. a fellowships culture on campus. And I believe because students come and go that that fellowships culture really resides in the faculty and the staff and the administration.

You know, one of the things that we can point to is that when we start to see this kind of spike in awards, it really coincides with the creation of my office. Now I wasn’t there at the time, so I can’t claim any of that credit, but it’s really easy to see that when we started committing resources to helping students identify these opportunities, To working with them to help them craft and articulate who they are as scholars and as leaders and as people that our students, the rest of the world was suddenly able to see what we kind of knew all along.

And so our goal for the office is to continue to build that culture, to continue to have the resources that allow us to support students. You know, a lot of this work you can’t really scale. It’s one on one advising work. It’s reading drafts and commenting on drafts and telling students to scrap that draft and start again because the direction you’re going isn’t gonna work in that way.

Have a lot of the things that I did in my past life still come back, right? It’s still a lot of the same kind of advising, but it’s building those personal connections and getting to the point where students are comfortable telling you things they might not initially be prepared for. to open up and let you in on.

Because those are often the moments when you start to understand what makes a student tick. And then, okay, now I understand. Now suddenly all these disparate things you’re doing, they all make sense. Because now we can see how, what’s really motivating you, what’s really animating you. And that work just takes time.

And it takes one on one attention, and so those are our goals, is to continue to have that time. I’m looking forward to the summer, because I get to do a lot more of that work. As you all know, in April, it always feels like it’s kind of every job is administrative in April. But we call it May-pril, actually, in our office, because it’s just this blur, right?

That’s the work that we enjoy the most. That’s the work that’s the most rewarding, and that’s the one where you really get to build special relationships with, with students.

Mike: Vin, thank you very, very much for stopping by today. You’re doing great work on campus, you and your office, and, and like we said, it’s, it’s, it’s great what you’re doing for the individual students and the experiences they get to have, but it’s also great, for flying the UConn flag.

Vin: Thanks for having me.