By Matt Schuman
The letter to Dr. Kristen Zgoba, dated February 25, 2014, began as follows: “On behalf of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FSB), I am pleased to congratulate you on your selection for a Fulbright award to the United Kingdom.”
It wasn’t until much later that she got around to reading the rest of the one-page correspondence.
“I was overwhelmed,” recalled Zgoba, supervisor of Research and Evaluation for the New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC). “This is the ultimate award for an academic. Even though I still haven’t fully processed it, I’m excited, I’m nervous, and I’m anxious to begin my work.”
Previous Fulbright participants went on to become CEOs, judges, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, university presidents and even heads of state. Approximately 800 award recipients are selected annually in various disciplines from among thousands of applicants worldwide. Zgoba is one of only two individuals to have received a Fulbright award for 2014-2015 in the field of criminal justice.
Zgoba, whose research on sexual crimes and sex offender laws has been extensive, proposed testing sex crime legislation in the United Kingdom – specifically, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – in terms of its impact on sex offense rates.
“This is the next logical step for the research, which has been done in the United States,” said Zgoba, who received her doctoral degree from Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice in 2004, the same year she began working at the NJDOC.
She will attend a three-day orientation in London in September, where she will meet with her fellow award winners. She then will return to the United Kingdom to begin her research in January 2015 and remain there through April.
Completing her work within the three-month time frame stipulated in her proposal “certainly is going to be a challenge,” Zgoba admitted. “I’ll be going to four different countries to collect sex-crime data with which I’m unfamiliar. These nations have overarching criminal justice systems that are vastly different from ours. It will be interesting to navigate among them.”
She began work on the Fulbright application last July and managed to complete the process ahead of the late-August deadline.
“Some people start working on the application a year or so in advance. I started a month in advance,” Zgoba related. “At one point, I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off. The application process was about 35 pages, with multiple steps and numerous questions I’d never answered before. I had to develop a five- to 10-page research proposal that laid out all of the steps in terms of methodology, analysis and sources of data.”
Along with her application, Zgoba, who has taught both undergraduate and graduate classes at Rutgers since 2002, needed to provide support and approval letters from a host institution in the United Kingdom. That institution turned out to be the University of West London, which proceeded to offer her a visiting professorship during her stay. The requirements also included three letters of recommendation, one of which was written by NJDOC Commissioner Gary Lanigan.
Roughly six weeks after the application deadline, Zgoba received notification from the FSB that she had survived the peer review process, which consisted of a panel of researchers vetting the research proposed in the application. Her sources indicated that was a significant development.
“Peer review is apparently where the vast majority of applicants are rejected,” she said.
The next level of review began on Capitol Hill and subsequently was transferred to the Fulbright Commission of the United Kingdom in England. In December, Zgoba learned that she made it through those stages. The final step came in late January in the form of a telephone interview. Exactly five weeks after that interview, she received a letter of congratulations.
“I took a day to let it soak in, then I began getting the necessary paperwork together,” she said, “There’s so much to be done. I need to get a UK Visa, medical clearance, open a British bank account and even get a UK driver’s license, which means I’ll need to learn to drive on the opposite side of the road.”
In addition, Zgoba needs to make living arrangements in each of the four venues in which she will be collecting and analyzing data. Perhaps most important, she must make sure every element of her research is set up well in advance. That process, in fact, already has begun.
Her timetable will be no less hectic once she actually begins her work in the United Kingdom. Still, she is determined to truly experience the countries she visits. Furthermore, Zgoba, an avid distance runner, is hoping to take part in the 2015 London Marathon, which is held each April.
“Being a Fulbright scholar obviously comes first,” she said. “My top priority will be getting the research done. That said, as long as I’m able to do the research and remain in full compliance with what I’ve proposed, I do plan to explore.
“At this point, I don’t know to expect or, for that matter, where I’ll be living,” Zgoba continued, “but I’m looking so forward to finding out.”