By Mackenzie Grizzard | Assistant News Editor
Baylor had only 23 applicants for the Fulbright U.S. Student Grant program in 2019. Six years later, Baylor’s Office of Engaged Learning produced more than 23 winners.
As of this year’s success, Baylor now ranks No. 1 in the state of Texas for Fulbright recipients and continues to uphold its Top 20 national ranking.
Dr. Daniel Benyousky, Baylor’s newly appointed director of major fellowships and awards, highlighted that this is the third consecutive cycle that Baylor has been recognized as a “Fulbright Top Producer” and praised the collaboration within the OEL and across many different departments.
“We have so many people involved in an expanded capacity in a pretty significant way,” Benyousky said. “We partner with people across campus. [We] might not be the ones mentoring students with their STEM research, because they work with a PI, but we’re there to help support students pursuing various cool things.”
The Fulbright is an educational exchange program that allows students across the U.S. to pursue graduate study, research or teach English in over 140 countries. Since 2001, Baylor has boasted over 130 winners — many of whom were within the last three cycles. Numbers like these are personal to Benyousky, who heads up his two-person team with Dr. Anna Beaudry, assistant director of major fellowships and awards.
“We were surprised that there were 103 applicants this year, which is great, but the problem is scaling up support,” Benyousky said. “We want to maintain that sort of formative approach, [but] we also don’t want to be overtaxed.”
Now working as a two-person team, Benyousky and Beaudry have focused on streamlining and improving the process for themselves and the student applicants.
“The biggest thing I did coming in was basically build an application management platform,” Beaudry said. “Many organizations that handle a lot of grants do so through a grant management platform, so I designed one for us that met our students’ needs and would streamline communication.”
According to Beaudry, in the Fulbright cycle following the creation of this platform, the department saw a 41% increase in the number of students applying for the Fulbright and a 33% increase in the number of winners.
“I hear frequently from our applicants, both those that win and those that don’t, that this is a really overwhelming process and the systems we have in place make it really manageable,” Beaudry said. “We’re having less attrition in the students that apply because of the way we’ve structured it.”
Beaudry emphasized that working with students throughout the Fulbright cycle is an “exercise in patience and perseverance.” Typically, the office begins hosting info sessions early in the spring semester and across the summer, preparing students to submit their final applications early in the fall.
“As they wait, we don’t hear back about first cuts until January or February, and then final decisions are typically March and April — but this year there was quite a bit of interference in the process from the federal government,” Beaudry said.
Earlier this year, the Trump Administration began slashing federal funding for research grants and scholarships, causing uncertainty for universities nationwide. The office of major fellowships and awards and Baylor’s Fulbright applicants felt this squeeze as well, with results delayed over a month, according to Beaudry.
“Even then, responses can still trickle through because some people will accept and have to renege on their offers or there can be some other hiccups,” Beaudry said. “But we just had a student this past week who was an alternate, get flipped to a winner — so we’re actually up to 24 winners as of this week.”
Accompanying another banner year for Fulbright winners, Baylor applicants swept the board, with winners of other scholarship programs also being recognized. Beaudry highlighted the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship program, in which universities can only nominate four exceptional students and an additional spot open for a graduate student.
Much like the Fulbright, this year was a landslide win for Baylor applicants, with four out of the five Goldwater nominees winning the scholarship.
“It’s definitely an ‘it-takes-a-village’ mentality in pulling off these scholarships,” Beaudry said. “We really couldn’t do what we do without our many campus partners, individuals and organizations who support our work and make sure the right students find the right door to our office.”
With a new Fulbright cycle already underway, the OEL plans to continue chasing success in 2026.
“Our goal for this year is manageable growth and sustainability and using that regained bandwidth to pour into our applicants and supporting their applications in hopes we see a return on investment in the form of wins,” Beaudry said. “But even if we don’t, the return on investment will be that we are working within our means instead of outside them.”
