Hey,
I'm a Fulbright nominee from Honduras. I'm applying thru the Fulbright-LASPAU program, so it's a little different than the straight Fulbright treatment.
I started the application process to Fulbright last year (2013), around April. By this time I had to have my GRE and TOEFL Scores (which I did since Oct 2012). After about 2 months waiting, I got thru the first "filter" and was contacted about doing some additional standardised tests. This was yet another part of the screening process for the scholarship, and was contacted about 2 or 3 weeks later about programming an interview. My interview was programmed for a monday morning in Mid-August. At the interview phase, I suppose (from having peeked at the receptionists sign-in sheets) that there were 6 people lined up for interviews.
I went in for mine, and later that day I received another email notifying me of my status as a Nominee. I don't know if it's standard procedure that they make a decision and notify on the same day, but I don't think it is. I think they were just running late on their decisions. In the end, 3 nominations were made for the category of scholarship I was applying to, and I was fortunate enough to be one of them.
Since my scholarship is a Fulbright-LASPAU, much of the application process is overseen by LASPAU. After being nominated, the contact with my Application Specialist (LASPAU employee) began in November. Here we decided what programs I could apply to from among my original choices (selected and submitted during the scholarship application in April 2013). I had to eliminate a couple of schools on account of the tuition fees, and settled in on 5 schools: TAMU, NCSU, LSU, Purdue, and UTAustin. Once this was done, I had to contact faculty at each of these universities, and seek their support (i'm applying for a PhD program, and will require support as the scholarship only covers the first two years of the PhD).
During this part of the process, I had to scratch Purdue and UT Austin from my list as I did not get much in the sense of encouraging responses from faculty. However, NCSU, TAMU and LSU all came thru.
As the Fulbright-LASPAU scholarship allows up to 5 slots for university applications, the other two came by suggestion of the Placement Specialist at LASPAU. She recommended two additional programs (WPI and UIC) to which I am currently in the process of applying. The other three applications (TAMU, NCSU and LSU) all went out about 2 weeks ago, and now I have itchy fingers checking my mail every 10 seconds waiting for a response.
This in a nutshell is my experience. Oh, my stats when nominated for the scholarship were:
GRE: V:158 Q:156 AW:4.5, TOEFL iBT: 113, and 5 years of teaching experience at university level for the discipline I am applying to (structural engineering).
After nomination I retook the tests (as part of the scholarship covers these costs), but only improved marginally:
GRE V:159 Q:158 AW:4.5; TOEFL iBT 114
Anyone else out there in forum land looking to share?