Joseph Connelly

Usually, these blogs center around exciting trips abroad, or are reflections on a productive semester of research or projects.  Unfortunately for me, only the latter is true about this blog.  This semester I learned just how challenging it is to secure funding for research in the field of education.  This semester was fraught with failures, and learning to deal with these, accept them, and move on, may be the most important thing I learned from this project.

The semester started off on a bad foot when our group learned that we had not won the Asia Network grant for our trip to Taiwan.  While discouraged, we understood that this was a possibility as a Colby group had won the grant last year.  Armed with plans B, C, and D, we pressed forward.  With the grant money off the table, our next option was to apply for a variety of different funding from different parts of the school.  Some would apply for internship funding, some for provost funding, and some for a Goldfarb Center grant.  We would then pool all this money, and have enough to make the trip a reality.  Because I am a graduating senior, I was not eligible for any of this funding, and had to sit back and hope everyone did their job, and get a little bit lucky.  Once again, we were disappointed to find out that only one person in our group got internship funding from the career center, and we were still well short of our goal.  At this point we put plan C into action.

One of the life overseers of the college is an extremely wealthy Taiwanese alumnus, who’s foundation gives grants to American students studying or doing research in Asia.  Accordingly, we thought he would be the perfect fit to help fund our trip to his home country of Taiwan.  Unfortunately, we were once again unsuccessful, and despite approaching the alumnus and the development office several times, we could not secure the requisite funds.  At this point it was late April, we were starting to panic, and needed to scramble.  We realized that if we did not buy flights within a couple days, the prices would skyrocket, and it would be too late.  In a last-ditch effort, I sent an email to President Greene seeking money from the Office of the President.  One last time we failed to receive any money, and just like that our trip was dead.

On the surface this whole endeavor might appear to be an abject failure, and on some levels, it really was.  However, a deeper look shows that, as cliché as it sounds, there are some great life lessons to be learned from this.  My life had been privileged in that things usually just work themselves out for me.  I always have gotten into the schools I’ve wanted to, been placed in the leadership roles I have sought, and gotten the jobs I’ve applied for.  However, I understand that is not normal, and I have been extremely fortunate.  This may be one of the first times in my life when things just simply have not worked out the way I wanted them to, and I am okay with that.  Throughout this semester, I learned to enjoy the process, and not get too bogged down in the results.  Through my research, I learned a lot about citizenship education, and how childhood education socializes children to be citizens in a democracy.  It was an interesting interdisciplinary study that combined my government major, with education research that I was previously not knowledgeable about.  Moreover, I learned how to deal with failure in a productive and positive way, which is a lesson that will serve me well throughout my life.