One resolution complete

I have been making progress on some of my 19 resolutions all month, but I completed one for the first time yesterday when I hit the submit button on an application for a Knight Fellowship at Stanford. Resolution No. 10 is done.

I first heard about the Knight Fellowship nearly a year ago, when I read one of the daily job listing e-mails I still get from the University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. I went there for graduate school. The fellowship sounded pretty awesome - 10 months off work to study, complete a project and get paid more than I make as a working journalist. When I first saw the listing, the application wasn't even available for months so I figured I had plenty of time to work on it.

In October, the application on Stanford's Web site, where the Fellowship is offered, became available. I downloaded the pages of instruction, with a goal to start working on those essays right away. But then life and the holidays and helping with my cousin's wedding planning got in the way. So when January rolled around and I realized the application deadline was a month away, I finally got to work. I selected my letter of recommendation writers, picked out three additional references and got to work on the three required essays. I had to write my "journalistic autobiography," a project and study plan and an essay about my managerial style. I also selected five stories that I deemed to be my best work and I was almost ready to finish it off.

The only hitch came when I tried to upload pdfs of the newspaper pages, and they turned out to be files that were much too large to uploaded. I finally compromised and uploaded word documents of the stories. I figure if I am lucky enough to get an in-person interview, that will be my chance to show the actual pages complete with photos and placement, as well as an opportunity to talk about my work.

I don't know what kind of shot I have since the current year's fellows all sound like geniuses in their project summaries and short autobiographies. But as my coworker continually told me throughout the process, if you don't at least try, you'll never know.

Even if I don't get this fellowship, it certainly offered an opportunity to reflect on why I became a journalist and why I stay a journalist. At the end of the day, I love most of what I do and I feel like I make a difference.