GPSA: Grant forms in Spanish

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UNM’s Graduate and Professional Student Association is working to make applying for the grants it offers easier for Spanish-speaking students.

GPSA has been working on a project to translate grant-related documents into Spanish and may eventually enable graduate students to apply for grants in the language.

GPSA president Priscila Poliana said the organization began to implement the initiative to reflect the customs of the University and the state.

“The reason for which we are doing this is because UNM is a Hispanic-serving institution and because New Mexico is a bilingual state,” she said. ”We want to make sure that those practices are respected in GPSA.”

GPSA Chief of Staff Matthew Rush said the initiative aims to help Spanish-speaking students who are hindered because English is not their first language.

“We recognize that students who apply to our grant system who have English as a second language are somewhat at a disadvantage at writing the grant not in their native language,” he said. “In order to approach this issue, we decided to look into offering grant writing and scoring in Spanish, because that’s the predominant English alternative here in New Mexico.”

Rush said GPSA is working with the Portuguese and Spanish department to find fluent Spanish speakers to read and grade the grant applications. He said they had also worked on translating grant application documents into Spanish.

“The big thing that (GPSA Council Chair) Maria Elena (Corral) has focused on this summer is working on translating the grants’ bylaws and appeals, and also the general application process, in Spanish so that students can at least read it and understand all the requirements in the meantime, until we’re able to fully offer enough readers to be able to support reading it in Spanish,” he said.

GPSA will start offering its own grants in Spanish, Rush said. The three grants GPSA offers are the Student Research Grant, the Professional Development Grant and the New Mexico Research Grant, he said.

According to the GPSA grant website, the grants may be used to help “students looking to fund their research, travel expenses and/or the cost of research materials.”

Corral said the idea for translating grants into Spanish began last year during former GPSA Council Chair Kris Miranda’s term.
“It’s kind of a bigger idea than we initially thought it might be (with) a lot more work involved,” she said.

Translation of the grants documents began over the summer, but that is the “simpler” aspect of the project, Corral said. She said the documents have been translated and the committee is now trying to find readers to assess the Spanish grant applications.

While Spanish-speaking applicants cannot yet apply for grants in their native language, Corral said she hopes to see the project completed before the end of the spring so GPSA’s grant committee could accept applications for the summer cycle. But the date for completion for the project is not set, she said.

While the initiative has proven to be difficult, Corral said there has been support from organizations throughout UNM.

“As of yet we do have support from numerous offices here at the University to ahead with the project,” she said. “For example, (Associate Vice President of Student Affairs Eliseo) Torres has voiced his support and the dean of graduate studies, as well as El Centro de la Raza, is interested in helping us once we get the ball rolling with this. But as of yet, we’re really early in the process.”

Though various University departments support the project, Corral said some individuals have voiced opposition to translating the grant applications.

“There’s the opinion that this is the United States and the dominant language is English, and so we should really not go through the effort of translating this document into Spanish,” she said.

Corral said this semester is “dedicated to figuring out all of the details” of allowing students to submit applications in Spanish and GPSA has yet to find a way of implementing the initiative.
“My grant co-chairs and I have not necessarily come to any kind of firm agreement as to what would be the best way to implement this.

Whether in stages, initially, maybe just offering the descriptions of the grants in Spanish and not yet accepting applications,” she said. “But there are also pros and cons to doing that. I don’t want the project to lose steam.”