If you are a Catalan engineering student who has just heard about the Balsells Fellowship and you are trying to work out whether it is real, whether it is reachable, and whether it is worth flying to the other side of the world for six months, this post is for you. It is the post I wish I had found before I applied.
I did the fellowship in the first half of 2026, at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. What follows is not the brochure version. It is the mechanics: how you actually get it, what it actually pays, how you actually find a place to live, and the things that went wrong that nobody warned me about. I will be honest about the hard parts, because the hard parts are the ones you can prepare for, and the good parts take care of themselves.
What the Balsells Fellowship actually is
Before anything else, understand what you are applying to, because it changes how you should apply.
The Balsells is not a travel scholarship. On paper it funds a six-month research stay at UC Irvine for at most three engineering students from Catalonia per semester, and it doubles as your Bachelor's senior project or Master's thesis. But the real nature of it is that it is a research on-ramp. The people who run it are looking for students who intend to do research, ideally a PhD later, and the fellowship is the door many of them walk through to get there. When I arrived, there were around twenty Catalan PhD students at UCI, and most of them had first come through this same fellowship.
That matters for you in a very concrete way. When you write your application, they want to see a research profile and a genuine willingness to continue in research. If you frame yourself as someone looking for a nice international semester, you are applying against the grain. If you frame yourself as someone who wants to do research and sees this as the first step, you are applying with it. This is the single most important thing to internalize, and I will come back to it.
How you find out it exists, and how you apply
I first heard about the fellowship through my faculty's news channel. I study at the Facultat d'Informàtica de Barcelona at UPC, and I was subscribed to their announcements, and one day the call came through there. Later there was an in-person talk by a former fellow, Benjamin Parellada, who explained his experience. There is also an official Balsells website with a lot of detail. So the first practical lesson is almost embarrassingly simple: subscribe to your faculty's channels and go to the talks, because this is not a thing that gets shouted about, and plenty of qualified people never find out it exists.
The application itself is a package of documents, and there is no interview at any stage. You submit a motivation cover letter, three to five recommendation letters from professors or employers, your academic transcript, a certificate of advanced English, a certificate proving you are registered as a resident in Catalonia, and your CV. And, crucially, you need a letter from your future UCI professor confirming that they are willing to be your mentor.
For the recommendation letters, I submitted four: one from my employer at the ALBA Synchrotron, where I had interned, and three from professors at UPC. So the relationships you want to have built beforehand are a mix. Professors who have taught you well and can speak to your ability, and ideally someone who has seen you work in a real setting.
The part nobody helps you with: getting a mentor
Here is the wall that stops most people, and the thing the official process quietly assumes you will solve on your own. You must already have a UCI professor who has agreed to be your mentor before you apply. And neither UPC nor UCI will help you get one. UPC, honestly, barely knows this fellowship exists. There is no coordinator who introduces you to professors. You do it yourself.
The way I did it, and the way most people do it, is cold emailing. But not blind cold emailing. What worked for me was reading papers, finding the work that genuinely excited me, and then emailing those specific professors to ask whether they had an open project I could do as my senior project, or to propose one. This is better than firing off a generic template to fifty inboxes, because a professor can tell the difference between someone who has read their work and someone who has read their faculty page.
I emailed a lot of professors. Most did not reply, which is normal, do not take it personally and do not stop. Vijay Vazirani replied quickly and told me he had just designed a new algorithm in a recent paper and that I could build the implementation. That is how the match happened. Fast, almost casual, after a lot of silence from everyone else.
One thing I did not fully appreciate at the time, and that I want you to appreciate now: choosing this professor is not just choosing a project. It shapes your entire six months. It determines how much you are mentored, how much freedom you get, and how heavy the work is. So when you are reading those papers and picking who to email, do not only chase the most interesting topic. Think about the person and how you would want to work.
Timeline, and the long silence
Plan on a full year of lead time. You apply roughly a year before you would fly, and the deadline is before February. There are two intakes, September and February, and February is the one they prefer. I applied for the February cohort.
Then comes the hard part of the timeline, which is the waiting. After you apply in February, you hear very little. They are not especially communicative and they do not give you much feedback along the way. The answer, yes or no, comes around June. So from February to June you are in limbo, and there is nothing to do but wait. I know from the fellows who arrived a semester before me that this silence is just how it works, so try not to read anything into it.
The standard path from there looks like this. You are admitted, you go for the full six months, and the stay ends in July. Then you have August and September as a gap. And then you present your project back at UPC through the extraordinary defense, in person, in October. That is the normal shape of it, and if you are planning your final year, that is the calendar to plan around. (I am less sure of the exact flying logistics for the September cohort, so if that is you, confirm the dates directly with the coordinators rather than trusting a secondhand account.)
A note on duration, and this is my read rather than an official rule: the fellowship is six months, and when you apply you should commit to the full six. If you go in asking whether it could be shorter, I suspect you make it easy for them to say no. Commit to the whole thing.
How competitive it is, and what I think got me in
It is competitive in the sense that a lot of strong profiles apply for at most three places a semester, and people do get rejected. I do not want to pretend it is a formality, because it is not.
But two things are also true. The first is that a surprising number of good candidates never apply at all, not because they would not get in, but because they are afraid. Afraid of flying that far, afraid of being away for six months. Several of my friends with excellent records simply did not put themselves forward for that reason. So part of the competition removes itself.
The second is that I believe what got me selected was a strong research background, because that is what the fellowship is built to reward. This loops back to the very first section. They want researchers. If you have research experience, lead with it. If you are early and you have time before you apply, go and get some, because it is the profile that fits.
The visa, and getting into the country
You go to the US on a J-1 non-immigrant visa, as a visiting scholar rather than an enrolled student, which is why so much of the limbo I describe later exists. Everything in this section is accurate as of July 2026, but visa rules, and especially the interview and screening logistics, change frequently and with US politics, so treat the specifics as a starting point and verify the current requirements yourself before you rely on them.
The core requirement is a funding proof. My UCI invitation letter asked me to show a minimum of 2,400 dollars per month of financial support for the stay, and, crucially, J-1 non-degree students must demonstrate that at least 51 percent of those funds are non-personal, meaning they come from your home institution, a scholarship, or a fellowship rather than your own pocket. This is exactly where the Balsells does quiet double duty: the fellowship money is what lets you satisfy the 51 percent rule. Your own savings alone cannot.
That funding rule creates a sequencing trap you need to know about, because I walked straight into it. When Vazirani accepted as my mentor, he triggered UCI's international center to begin the visa process, and they started it before I had actually been awarded the fellowship. The Balsells then told me to stop, because the process cannot begin until you hold the fellowship, since the fellowship is the very thing that proves your funds are more than half non-personal. So the order is fixed and not negotiable: fellowship first, then visa. Do not let the international center run ahead of the funding proof, however eager everyone is to get moving.
As of now, the process involves an in-person interview at the US consulate in Madrid, along with a screening check that currently requires you to set your social media accounts to public. Expect to be approved without much trouble, but you do have to go through it in person.
Before you fly to the US, UCI's central Human Resources will email you (in my case from UCICampusOnboard@uci.edu) to schedule onboarding, and you will be told to check in at the International Center when you arrive in the US. That is the legitimate arrival paperwork, and it is guided by UCI, so you are not figuring it out alone. When you eventually leave, you simply notify the international center.
Health insurance, and how to avoid paying twice
This one is a small trap with a clean solution, so here it is. You have to satisfy two separate institutions at once. UPC requires you to hold an insurance they have a partnership with, and UCI separately requires insurance that meets the J-1 program's minimum requirements, since the visiting-scholar position itself comes with no medical benefits. UPC's official on-campus option is through ERGO. UCI's official one is through Gallagher.
The move that saves you from paying for two policies: UCI will accept a non-Gallagher policy, but only if you send it to Gallagher and they verify it meets their requirements. The UPC on-campus ERGO policy does meet those requirements. So what I did, and what I would recommend, is take the UPC on-campus insurance, email it to Gallagher for approval, and get it signed off. One policy then satisfies both UPC and UCI, instead of buying insurance twice.
The money, honestly
This is the section I most wish someone had given me straight, so here it is straight.
The fellowship pays 8,600 dollars for the entire six-month stay. It is not a salary and it does not arrive as a monthly payroll. It comes as two checks: one when you arrive, and one at the halfway point. So plan your cash flow around two lump sums, not a steady wage.
And now the part that matters most: it does not cover your costs. California, and Irvine in particular, is one of the most expensive places in the world to live. The 8,600 dollars is a contribution, not a wage. In my case I spent around 14,000 dollars, because we bought a car and traveled heavily, to Hawaii, Yosemite, San Francisco, San Diego, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas. Much of that gap is discretionary, the travel and the car, so a very frugal fellow who skips the big trips and keeps things tight can get the fellowship to cover something close to their essentials. But even then it is tight.
My honest recommendation is to arrive with at least 5,000 dollars of your own savings on top of the fellowship, and more if you want to travel. Think of it this way: budget the fellowship for survival, and bring your own money for the actual experience. I say this plainly because I do not want the cost to be the thing that quietly excludes people who could otherwise do this. Know the number, and decide with your eyes open.
Housing, and the limbo you live in
There is one status quirk that explains almost everything awkward about living there, so I will name it once here and it will keep coming up. You are not a student, because you are not enrolled. And you are not an employee, because you are not on a payroll. You are in a limbo between the two, and that limbo is why you cannot get university housing, why the food pantry is awkward to access, and more.
Because you are not a student, you get no university housing. You must find a place off campus, and it is genuinely hard. The core problem is that landlords are not looking for students and even less for short term students. They are looking for tenants with a salary and long leases, and you are a foreign student with neither. On top of that, with no US credit score, the formal channels are largely closed to you.
I paid 900 dollars a month for a shared room with two other people, in an apartment shared between six. That is not a typo and it is not unusual. Budget for it.
The channels that actually work, in the order I would try them. First, your own network: I found my place through a friend who was already there, and honestly the Catalan and UCI community is your best lead, so reach out before you do anything else. Second, UCI's official off-campus housing website. It normally requires a UCI login you do not have, but you can request a Guest account by sending a mail and explaining your situation. Then you can search and see rental listings. Do this. (There is also a faculty and staff housing site, though as a short-term visitor the off-campus one will be more useful.) Third, Facebook Marketplace, which works but is full of scams, and the scams are sophisticated, so be genuinely careful and never send money to someone you have not verified.
Whatever the channel, vet hard before you commit. Get the agreement in writing and signed. Do video calls so you actually see the place and the person. Never blindly trust a landlord, and only commit when you are one hundred percent sure, because it is a long lease and a lot of money on the line. I will not name anyone, but I will say this plainly: if a landlord is running an informal arrangement, is vague about what your money is for, or makes you uneasy, walk away. There are enough options that you do not need to sign with the one that feels wrong.
And the reassurance, because the search can be demoralizing: start early, expect to do a lot of checking, do not get discouraged. Everyone ends up housed in the end.
The research, and how much it varies
I need to be careful here, because my experience was not typical, and it would be misleading to sell it as the norm.
My supervisor was on illness leave for much of my stay. Because of that, I was given a lot of autonomy: my own office space, a PhD student assigned to help me, and a project, a computational one, that I could largely run remotely from my apartment. For me it was not especially hard, and the rhythm was relatively relaxed. But two specific things made it that way, the supervisor being away and the project being the kind of theory-and-implementation work you can do from a laptop, and you should not assume you will get the same.
The fellowship also takes a lot of aerospace and industrial engineers, and for them it is a different life. They need to be physically in a lab running experiments, and when a deadline is near that can mean long, hard weeks. So your day-to-day depends heavily on your field and your advisor. A computer science or theory student may get flexibility like mine. A lab-based engineer should expect real hours at the bench.
There is, though, a structural reason the fellowship generally cannot be too demanding, and it is worth knowing. You are doing project work for a professor without being paid. You are, in effect, working for free, and that puts a natural ceiling on what anyone can reasonably ask of you. The people genuinely grinding are the funded PhD students, who work far more than the fellows do. So while the intensity varies, it is rarely brutal, and if it starts to feel that way, remember the arrangement you are actually in.
On the defense: mine was atypical here too. The standard path is to present in person at UPC in October through the extraordinary defense. I presented online in July instead, and it came with real friction, connection problems on UPC's side and the time-zone gap, and presenting online is simply not the same as being in the room. Two of the three fellows in my cohort flew back to present in person in July. The lesson is to plan your defense format and timing deliberately, know the October extraordinary-defense option exists, and take seriously that a remote defense carries avoidable technical risk.
Daily life, distances, and the car
The thing that reorganizes your daily life in California is distance. Everything is far, and public transport is minimal. Within the immediate area you can get by, but going between cities by transit eats enormous amounts of time. To put a number on it: if you want to visit Los Angeles, it is about an hour by car and roughly five hours by public transport, each way. That single comparison tells you why transport dominates so many decisions.
Your options are to lean on Ubers, which add up fast, to rent a car for a weekend and pay for a motel each time you travel, or to buy a car. We bought one, three of us together, specifically to make trips possible.
The buying mechanic is worth knowing. Because none of us had a US credit score, the formal routes, dealer financing and the like, were effectively closed, the same wall you hit with housing. So we bought used, person to person, from another UCI member who had posted an advert on a physical noticeboard. That is the route I would point you to: buy used, from within the community, and expect the no-credit-score problem.
Now the honest verdict, because this is one where I do not want to give you a tidy recommendation I do not believe. For me, the car was not clearly worth it. It is a lot of money, coordinating shared ownership between three people was messy and hard to keep in sync, and it ended in real problems that, from the other side of the world, caused me genuine anxiety.
Here is what happened, kept general on purpose. From the start it was hard to share: who drives, who pays for gas, who covers what. It was an old car, so mechanical problems came, an engine issue, a check-engine light, and nobody wanted to deal with them. Then both of the others left before I did, and I was left alone with a car registered in all three of our names and every problem to solve. In California you cannot transfer a car that has active problems or a check-engine light, so I had to pay to fix it first, front a lot of money, and then chase the others to be paid back. And then I still had the puzzle of who to transfer it to. It was a hot potato: I was left holding the responsibility while the others waved it off.
So the lessons, which are the useful part. Do not co-own a car unless you have agreed the boring things in writing first: who pays for what, how gas and maintenance are split, and, above all, what happens when someone leaves early, because people leave on different dates. Understand that whoever's name is on the title is the one legally holding the problem when the others are gone. Think hard before putting your name on a shared old car at all. And know that mechanical problems block a transfer, which is how a broken shared car becomes one person's expensive trap. If you are not willing to take that risk with people you deeply trust, do not take it, and rent per trip instead.
Food and the pantry
For groceries and everyday needs, the University Town Center is close and has supermarkets, restaurants, fast food and shops. Nothing surprising there.
The tip worth having is the UCI food pantry, which gives out free food. Most Balsells fellows end up using it to save on groceries, and I would recommend taking a look. Getting access is a little awkward, again because of the limbo, you are not a student and not an employee, so you do not automatically qualify. But you can still get in by requesting the right UCI permits, which you can ask for. Do it. Over six months the savings are real.
The people, and whether it is worth it
If your fear is arriving alone on the other side of the world, let me put it to rest. The friendships come from everywhere. There is an established Spanish and Catalan community, often older than you, PhD students and postdocs, but happy to fold you into their groups. There are your roommates. And there are other international students who arrived exactly as you did and are actively looking for new friends too. You do not need to arrive with a network. The network is already there, and it opens to you if you reach out, at international parties and at the events the university runs. Go to them.
On the demographics, because it genuinely surprised me and it is worth expecting: in ICS and the circles I moved in, the overwhelming majority of the people around me were Asian, well over seventy percent of the faces in the building, with large Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Vietnamese and Thai communities. Campus-wide the share is lower, closer to a third, but that was not what my day to day looked like. People were incredibly welcoming, and it is a richly international place. Arrive ready to meet people unlike the ones you grew up around, and dive in.
As for whether the whole thing is worth it, the most honest way I can put it is that it comes down to a choice. You can spend the six months traveling and being a tourist, or you can spend them working, and you have to decide the balance. PhD students manage to do both, and it is possible, but doing both costs money, which sends you straight back to the budgeting question. Every trip I took was worth it. But the trips and the work pull against each other, and being clear-eyed about which you are optimizing for, and what you can afford, will save you a lot of stress.
What I would do differently
If I could send advice back to myself before I flew, it would be a short list.
Start the housing search much earlier, and calmer. Do not rush it, and do not commit to anything you are not one hundred percent sure of. Almost every housing problem I have heard of traces back to committing too fast.
Get to know your fellow fellows properly before taking on a big shared responsibility with them, like a car. Build the friendship and understand how someone operates before you tie your money and your paperwork to theirs.
Do a real budget before you go, not after you arrive and the costs surprise you.
And more generally, arrive prepared. Know roughly where you want to go and what you want to do. I will be honest about my own failure here: I came to Irvine straight from my exchange at EPFL in Switzerland, and I was literally sitting exams the day before I flew. I arrived with almost no preparation, and a lot of the friction of those first weeks was the direct result. Do not do that. Give yourself the runway I did not.
A last word
None of what I have written is meant to talk you out of it. The hard parts are real, and I have laid them out precisely so they do not blindside you the way some of them blindsided me. But six months doing research at a top American university, in a place you can build a life and a set of friendships from nothing, is a rare thing, and it changed the shape of what I thought I could do.
If you have the research profile and the nerve, apply. And if you are one of the people talking yourself out of it because California is far and six months is long, that fear is exactly the thing standing between you and one of the best decisions you could make. Go.