Highlight and Cultivate Graduate Fellowship Success

I think we should highlight and cultivate our student success with Fulbright fellowships. It's very prestigious and is great marketing. It also signals to other people that we are a very academic and intellectually sophisticated place. In addition to external publicity we should -- from day 1 -- talk up such things with current students. It signals to them that we have high aspirations for them, it generates a culture of expectation (that's the kind of things Mills students do), and might have remarkable effect on that person we might not identify but who could self identify and decide "I'm going to do that." From an admissions perspective, one can imagine that every Fulbright, etc. is worth its weight in gold. Relatedly, we should set some real concrete strategic goals around prestigious fellowships. At this point it is all sort of left to chance without much coordination. Why don't we set the goal, before the decade is out to have two students at least reach the interview stage for Rhodes, Marshall, or Gates fellowships? And set a target for NSF graduate fellowships too. And then convene some of us on the faculty to talk about how we will reach these goals.