I participated in an interesting seminar today at the National Association of Fellowship Advisors (NAFA) conference about “Trends in National Fellowship Advising.” Both the speakers and participants discussed trends and statistics surrounding the most well-known awards for undergraduates, like the Truman and the Rhodes Scholarships. Yet, there are many other well-funded fellowships and awards that seem to get much less attention at the university level. One of the reasons for this is that both students and advisors aren’t aware of many of these opportunities.

New and exciting fellowship programs for recent college graduates and professionals are cropping up all the time. For example, last year the City Hall Fellows Program instituted a new one-year service-oriented fellowship program in Baton Rouge. Also, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation recently established the Leonore Annenberg Teaching Fellowship, what they describe as “the equivalent of a national ‘Rhodes Scholarship’ for teaching.” And there’s more!

It’s impossible to expect any individual to be aware of the thousands of existing and new fellowships, which is why ProFellow can help. Our goal is to become the largest online database of professional and academic fellowships in the world and we will be exercising specific strategies to ensure the information in our database is both accurate and up-to-date. Stay tuned!