Tiffany Reyes-Denis is a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology. When she arrived at Illinois in 2021, she attended professional development workshops primarily to understand the resources available to graduate students. Over the next five years, she developed a series of fellowship and grant proposals, refined her dissertation project, built relationships with faculty mentors, and earned several awards, including an APA Dissertation Research Award, a Graduate College Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and a College of Education Dissertation Award. Along the way, she attended our workshops on writing an effective fellowship proposal, writing an effective personal statement, the Social Science & Humanities Fellowships Summer Writing Lab, and sought one-on-one reviews of a number of proposal drafts. In the conversation below, Tiffany reflects on what proposal writing taught her about research, mentorship, feedback, and professional growth.
Building a Toolkit
When you first arrived at Illinois, what did you know about fellowships?
I didn't know much. I had never studied at a U.S. university before [she earned her bachelor’s from the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico and master’s from the University of Granada in Spain], and this is a large institution, so I was a little overwhelmed in the beginning. I went to as many workshops as I could and my advisor, Dr. Michelle Perry, helped me filter things and figure out what was most useful for me at the time.
At that stage, I wasn't necessarily planning specific fellowship applications. I just wanted a toolkit of things so that I would know where to go and how to approach opportunities when they came up. I was collecting information and putting it in my physical and mental files. Later, once I had a clearer sense of my research and goals, I became much more intentional. At that point, I knew I wanted to pursue fellowships, so the way I approached workshops and training became much more targeted. It wasn't about seeing what existed anymore. It was about figuring out what to do and how to do it well.