If you could change one thing about being a CfA Fellow... #48
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I was a 2014 Fellow. I don't regret doing it and I think it can be a great thing for people, depending on what their expectations are and what they want to get out of it. I think it's very important to approach the fellowship with strong goals (could be personal development, learning a new skill, career-related, etc), and flexibility and openness as to how you achieve them. A successful Fellow is self-directed and self-disciplined. There's a certain element of chaos involved in making the whole thing work, so you must be okay with working in an environment where you provide your own order. If I were to do it over again, I would put in more work up front to establish that order and clarify direction, goals, and measures of success on my fellowship team, with city partners, and with other CFA staff members. |
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(current 2015 Fellow) |
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current fellow here! hmm... one thing about being a fellow… more integration between fellowship projects, staff projects, and how they roll up into the larger organizational strategy. sometimes it feels a bit like “work the fellows are doing” and "work the staff is doing" without a lot of intersection. also, to @jden point: "If I were to do it over again, I would put in more work up front to establish that order and clarify direction, goals, and measures of success on my fellowship team, with city partners, and with other CFA staff members." i think they did a great job of addressing this exact concern this year. we had time dedicated to defining goals for ourselves and as a team in the beginning of the year and got to talk through those goals with staff. it was really helpful. |
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As a small thing, I like your suggestion about better support for finding housing, and at the same time, I think everyone was mostly satisfied with their experience finding housing this year. My top thing would be greater understanding around the outcomes of previous CfA fellowship projects. In terms of working in a space that needs attention and doing good in that space, I think CfA is doing very well. In terms of sharing the work they're doing, I think CfA is doing amazingly well. The result is a tale of astounding successes and unremarkable failures. It's accurate, and the failures are mentioned, and because of the way people want to tell and hear the larger story of hope and change, I think it makes it really easy to forget that a majority of projects are naturally sifted out of the organization's main storytelling pattern. For the greater organization, it's not a thing I would change. Toward incoming fellows, I would change how CfA as an organization communicates the nature of its results. You will do interesting, challenging, fulfilling work in some subset of the following domains: problem definition, product design, prototyping, user research. Depending on how far along the city partner is and depending on how quickly the nature of your fellowship lends itself to defining the problem, both the type of work your doing and the direct outcome of your work will vary significantly. In terms of some of the other things being discussed so far, CfA is growing somewhat quickly as an organization, and faces the same challenges as other quickly scaling organizations. The fellowship becomes more focused each year, and the projects have more support, attention, buy-in and preparation done by CfA staff and by the municipal partners each year. One hope may be that this will address the issue of project timelines and help them better fit within the 10.5 month fellowship period. They have created focus areas and are growing those areas and choosing fellows and city partners around them. As a fellow, I think my viewpoint is limited regarding this growth as compared to the viewpoint of the full-time staff, especially those who have been directly involved in those conversations. Another hope may be that focus areas help integrate staff and fellows along the axes of the focus areas. |
What would it be?
I'm really curious about the nuts and bolts of the program, the website doesn't provide too much detail about what to expect as a fellow...
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