secretlyismaili

AMEN. Weekend! TGIF and since I have China on the brain I feel like sharing: once on Friday at the end of the day I asked my Chinese teacher how to say "thank God it's Friday." She just looked at me blankly for a few seconds then said perfectly flatly, "there's no god in China." happy weekend everyone, enjoy. supposed to get up to around 70 here, woot woot

Haha, I can see them all out in their bathing suits holding a car wash and bake sale just for us. I just remembered the skit from Tim and Eric for the product called "Wait Mate" which is basically just a sleeping pill, you're supposed to take one for every day you want to sleep so that your wait goes by faster. but of course people OD on it like crazy

Come on Kyrgyzstan you Switzerland of Inner Asia you. Stop killing your applicants ;-) Maybe the Chinese and the Kyrgyz are scheming together again, just as they did against the Gokturks long ago. This definitely sux

Man. Yeah I hear you, and that's definitely not my own experience at least. I just hate the idea of prestige associated with a name, is all I'm saying. I went to Big State University before coming to where I am now, where people have a big time elitist attitude, and for sure many of the people back at State were way smarter than a lot of these goofballs here. But my current cohort will have a leg up just cuz of a name, which sucks. Btw yes I wish we had been comrades on those evening walks in NOLA. If I remember right your project deals with historical linguistics? Definitely my deal but more on the Turkic/Altaic-Chinese side.

Assalaamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakaatuhu! First, what gulf country are you going to? Have you studied Arabic? Khaliji Arabic? I wonder if Saudi Arabia has a program but I doubt it I guess. What would your project be? It's crazy to look at the data sheets since the Arab Spring began - all of a sudden you start to see N/A all over the place for grants available in the past couple years. Can't remember about the gulf now though, is Bahrain still afoot? Poor Syria. Back in 2008 I couldn't get any govt money to go there since they were considered a state sponsor of terrorism. Allah yar7amuhum

The main benefit is simply the opportunity to do a year-long research project way on off out in the world while getting paid and pretty much making a lot of your own guidelines. In the process you probably make a lot of connections and develop a lot of skills that will direct your life down paths it otherwise would never have taken. Of course most people in the world are susceptible to the illusion that "prestige" so often is (you meet really dull Ivy Leaguers), so it might unlock doors for that reason, but I think that should be the furthest thing from our minds in applying. I don't find the question condescending at all, and I'm just giving an opinion. Personally I know that being in grad school (or in the process - "pre-real world") is technically a prolonged phase of preparation, but I make every effort to still try to think of it as the real world, and to keep in mind that in this world exciting and challenging and fruitful and scary experiences are their own rewards. I just hope I don't sound condescending. For a second there I was having flashbacks of writing a personal statement, ekh.

Is there anything else you can share about the China apps? plz and thx

Best investment. You will never lack friends :-)

Super pumped to hear about these alternate statuses getting pushed through! So, I just found out from a friend here that he's on a Fulbright at the moment, from Pakistan. I had no idea. I guess Pakistan and Germany have special Fulb programs set up for them, because (as he says) they were concerned, at the time, with courting East German students to come to America after the wall fell, and they're also worried about a similar thing with remaining Pakistan's friend and ally. He invited me to go to the Fulbrighter farewell dinner with him on Saturday as a +1, which will be the 27th - the date last year that China notified. Gosh it'll be so much better if I hear positive news that day than not! btw that is not a picture of me

Rah rah rah Central Asia!

Mainland Chinese often stereotype Taiwanese Chinese as effeminate, but the truth is anywhere you go you will be confronted with the necessity of adapting to the local vernacular. When I lived in Xi'an I encountered, along with the overly-standardized language my acquaintances used with me for the purpose of efficacious communication, a distinct local Shaanxi substratum of the language that I never learned to use but learned to understand (a simple example, which is probably not even unique to Xi'an, is that instead of saying "shenme?" for "what?" they usually just say "sa?"). The most important difference will be traditional vs simplified characters, but honestly if you spend enough time learning the trad ones in Taiwan you will be golden for learning their simplified varieties on the dalu, mainland. That will be to your advantage.

I second the suggestion of the Luce program. Sorry, though, aside from that I don't really know of anything. You want this program to be abroad, and focused on research and language training? Those government scholarships would probably be a great bet, but if you wanted to do sth like that maybe an intensive summer program in the US would be good. There;s the speac, or summer program in east Asian concentration at Ohio State which you could almost definitely get a FLAS for, either through OSU or your own institution (if you are currently in school). There are plenty of other summer programs, I'm sure, and maybe shoot for Middlebury - the all-Chinese olympics they put on sounds fun.

Haven't heard any rumors, I was even searching around for a while in Chinese to see if I could find any hints. Oof, we are right in that timezone though - last year was 4.27, year before was 5.3, and before that was 4.19. Who the heck known if the sequester will have any bearing on things. Can't remember, did you say you also had to apply for the China Gov't Scholarship? I noticed that the deadline for that was near the end of this month so I fear it will take longer than we want it to. Depends on how efficiently they can go through the scholarship applications and on whether that is actually tied to the Fulb decision after all, like will they give preference to people who get the scholarship, or do they just hope it matches up, or what? WHAT, I say?!?!

I appreciate and frequently consume both, probably Abita more often though. Gotta say though I wasn't too into Jax brewery when we went there, whatever I got tasted like malt liquor. There's another brewery in the quarter that I like though. And (no one judge) the hardest thing for me to reacclimate to when I leave NOLA after a long period of time is the fact that I can't just take a leisurely walk out to the park with a beer in hand. Can be a very nice evening habit - the constitutional, or what do they call it in Italy? The evening walkabout deal?

Thanks for your reply - glad to hear that someone is going through a similar situation! I am also a little bothered about being away for a year, but I know we'll be able to handle it. Those who consider themselves relationship experts have been wrong about us so far and I am not too worried, but it will still be hard to be away from her for those 10 months. I'll definitely save up money to take a quick trip back at some point (if I get it, inshallah). She is indeed a very special lady and I look forward to a long happy life together, but we just have to get through the next couple of years of crap before that will happen. We kind of want a kid soon, too. Thanks for your input! And I wish you and your partner a future of romantic bliss.

From the great state of West Bengal but lives in the great state of Louisiana. I absolutely love spending time down there - the New Orleans life suits me just fine.

Hola! I recently had the good fortune to visit my friend in Louisville, OH, and to see a bit of Canton while I was out there. Hope I can go back someday. We had fun.

Hi everyone. We are so far into this process, which I hope has been a positive one even for those who didn't end up receiving a grant. It sure has been nice to have a community of people to share in this experience and keep morale up! So, this is only tangentially Fulb-related, but I wanted to solicit some advice from you valiant battle-tested heroes of scholarship... I have accepted a fellowship offer for a PhD program that is good and which I like. They are fine with the idea of me postponing my enrollment in the case that I end up in China (knock on wood...and throw in knocking on metal, water, fire, and earth for good measure) this coming year, with fellowship intact. But, my wife lives in a faraway land (the South), and she and I have only ever lived together for several three or four month stints at a time even though we have been together for almost seven years. I know, it ain't normal, and some might even say it ain't raaght. So I was thinking of asking this program if I could defer for a year to spend time with her in that faraway land. She goes up for tenure this year and plans to move to my location in summer 2015, regardless of the tenure outcome. The concern is that I would develop a reputation for flakiness right off the bat, on top of the possibility that they would say no. I was planning on selling it using a combination of personal, emotional appeal - the knowledge that time and youth are fleeting has been on my mind a lot recently - as well as giving a detailed proposal for a project which I would be working on during that time. This year they were able to make more admissions offers than ever before, but I don't know if that would have any bearing on their attitude. Any advice or comments you might have are now officially solicited, and I will be grateful for whatever you fine people can say. Lurkers welcome.

Hello fellow Ohioan. (Cincinnati)

do you guys think they contact the professor/individual who wrote you an affiliation letter? people who have been accepted, do you know either way? vPersie really sorry to hear about your news, but stay strong, don't be discouraged, reapply, and all the best for the coming year.

Hell yes! That is such a great movie. And I greatly appreciate the veneration of Thor. I would also like to invoke Odin's ancient Turkic cognate Öd Tengri, god of time, to make these days pass like the swift waters of the Yinchü River

Haha, how thoughtful of them :-)

nice! It rules. But Persian and Russian also probably rule pretty hard.

Yep the loss of vowel harmony certainly means the loss of one of the most remarkable features of Turkic...I mean the whole language family was practically built around it! I also think vowel harmony is cool. I guess it's only to the learner's benefit in terms of ease. Uyghur has all sorts of tricky orthographic peculiarities because of vowel and consonant harmony, which Uzbek abandoned in the course of acculturation to Persianate (originally Soghdian...) urban settled life. Uyghurs say of their language that that its "polu" (plov, main dish) is Turkic and it is spiced with Persian, but of Uzbek that its plov is Persian and its spice is Turkic. I absolutely do recommend Perdue's book, it's just really long and packed with a crazy amount of info re: Mongols and Tibetans, which is cool, but keeping the names straight has been an uphill battle. Not knowing a lot about Russian history I guess my judgment is limited on the Russia side, but he seems to have a pretty thorough lit review and it all sounds legit, plus he seems to be bringing a lot of Mongol knowledge into the picture that was missing from Russian historiography. And there's a lot about Russian perceptions of their own role, religiously, read against Mongol/Turkic/other inner Asian attitudes to Russian expansion. I'll check out the books you mentioned, for sure. Chinese history...I really like Familiar Strangers (Lipman) and Eurasian Crossroads (Millward), I mean they're both about the Northwest, which hasn't always been China, but in many ways China has been defined by its frontiers so I think they give an important part of the picture. Speaking of China, come ON, China!! Jeez Chrimbus. 哎呀! 什么回事啊?

Way to go Russia people!!