Author: Daniel Birdsall

Admissions Tips

A few details on scholarships

Daniel Birdsall

Scholarship funding is on many applicants’ minds around this time of year, for good reason. I’ve written recently about the importance of working on a broad-based financial plan, and most applicants hope that scholarship funding will make up as large a part of that plan as possible. Each year the release of admissions decisions triggers a deluge of requests for scholarship reconsideration and increased funding, and I figured a bit of detail on how our process works (and more specifically, why it works the way it does) could be helpful.

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Admissions Tips

Making your financial plan

Daniel Birdsall

With the bulk of this year’s admissions decisions recently released, it’s time to be thinking about a financial strategy for grad school. Our hope, in fact, is that applicants planning on fall 2019 enrollment have already been working on this for some time, at least conceptually. Pointing out that U.S. higher education is a significant investment is as obvious as noting that Samuel L. Jackson wasn’t pulling for Green Book to win Best Picture. As such, it’s crucial to think expansively about potential sources of funding.

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Uncategorized

Who says grad school is all work?

Daniel Birdsall

Spring break is still over a week away, and the weather of late certainly hasn’t indicated that winter is leaving anytime soon, but that hasn’t stopped Fletcher students from taking a study break to make the best of our latest round of snow. This fellow showed up outside of Ginn Library this week, ready with a flimsy high five and general good cheer for passers-by, and even sporting a dash of Fletcher orange.

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Fletcher Perspectives gallery
About Fletcher

The value of a little Perspective

Daniel Birdsall

Something I’ve always loved about Fletcher’s physical space is how it lends itself to interesting little corners and curios. Our building is a bit weird, in that’s it’s actually three buildings, but also one building. Fletcher rooms are all located in the Goddard, Cabot, or Mugar buildings, some of which years ago were discrete structures, but which are now connected into a single agglomeration, more artfully in some places than in others. I’m grateful to have an office with a window, for example, but rather than looking outside I get to peer down a floor to the reading room in Ginn Library, surely freaking out the occasional student who looks up to see me spacing out and emptily staring down at them. Other windows in the school give a view between floors of the adjacent building, or into the middle of a stairwell, and there are at least a few study spaces tucked underneath staircases. The effect in some places is a bit Hogwarts-ish, making it no surprise that the stately main reading room in the library is known informally as the Harry Potter Room.

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About Fletcher

The origins of “public diplomacy”

Daniel Birdsall

If you’ve poked around our website enough, or otherwise have more than a passing familiarity with Fletcher, you’ve likely come across the term “public diplomacy” at some point. While it mostly makes intuitive sense to me, I’ve rarely stopped to think specifically what we’re talking about when we refer to public diplomacy. An interesting piece of web content recently trickled down to me by way of one of Fletcher’s longest-tenured faculty members, as well as our Dean of Admissions, which I thought worth sharing.

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Career Trip schedule
About Fletcher

Washington, DC Career Trip

Daniel Birdsall

There’s currently a vacation-week feel to Fletcher, with empty classrooms and strangely quiet hallways. An extension of Presidents’ Day to a week-long holiday, perhaps? Good guess, but wrong. The lull is due to the annual Washington, DC career trip administered by the Office of Career Services (OCS). OCS has something going on at pretty much all times throughout the year, but even by their busy standards it’s fair to say that the DC Career Trip is their equivalent of the Super Bowl.

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Admissions Tips

Holistic application review at work

Daniel Birdsall

I frequently find myself telling prospective students to expect to hear the term “holistic application process” bandied about as they apply to grad school. It’s pretty much an industry-standard trope these days, and I sometimes worry it can come across as a chunk of highfalutin jargon that sounds official without actually meaning anything, like “solutions,” “cross-functional,” or “leverage” used as a verb. In the admissions context, “holistic” means that there’s not a single attribute upon which a decision will consistently hinge for all candidates, and that all the information we request in an application meaningfully contributes to an applicant’s case for admission.

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faculty book covers
About FletcherOur AlumniOur Faculty

Talking books with Fletcher book talks

Daniel Birdsall

As a house of learned doctors, Fletcher regularly gets to celebrate the release of major books by our faculty. There’s Prof. Chris Miller’s Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia, Prof. Alex de Waal’s Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, and Prof. Sulmaan Khan’s Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, to name a few of the more recent publications. It’s common for faculty to give “book talks” on campus in support of their latest work, and they’re among the most popular events during the academic year. Late March will see Prof. Kelly Sims Gallagher discuss her just-published Titans of the Climate: Explaining Policy Process in the United States and China.

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Reading day snacks
Our Staff

Lucas’ reading day

Daniel Birdsall

Around this time of year, this space often features staff reports from application reading days. While we all read applications here and there as we can, most of us try to carve out a day each week to focus solely on reading applications from home. This year it’s Lucas’ turn. Lucas has been reading applications for a few years now, but this year he’s entered the rotation of all-day reading binges.

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