Scholarships

The minute you decide you want to study abroad you should begin looking for scholarships. Deadlines for many of these scholarships end early and you want to apply for as many as you can because studying abroad is never cheap. For my trip in the fall of 2011, I started looking and applying for scholarships in the fall the year before, and even with all of my applying I only got one. It is tough competition,so here is my advice:

1. Ask your adviser for any scholarship information they have. Many times you need an academic and financial adviser to approve of your application when you send it, so you want to keep them updated and informed on what you are doing. Personally, I was in my advisers office almost daily to ask questions and get tips.

2. Make sure you leave yourself plenty of time to write your scholarship essays. Unless you are the perfect writer you will definitely want someone to edit your paper. I cannot stress this enough because the more grammatical errors you have, the worse your chance to be chosen is. Another hint in this area is to try and make your paper unique. Don't be afraid to be yourself in your paper and to tell your readers exactly why you want to study abroad. Put passion into it. When I was writing my essay for the Freeman Asia Scholarship, I put my childhood story in it about how I got into Japanese Culture and how it has affected me. Now this is not exactly an academic reason to travel abroad, but if you support your reasoning enough and tell how your experience well encourage you to grow, even academically, trust me, the scholarship committee will see that you are telling the truth and that you really care about traveling abroad.

3. Submit your application on time with all documents, and if any information changes, make sure you inform the committee who will be reviewing your scholarship. If information is incorrect and they know about it, you will not be receiving any scholarship.

4. If you are chosen as a recipient for a scholarship, make sure you accept it and reply with any needed information or documents as soon as possible. Some scholarships have deadlines for when you need to submit follow-up material, and if you miss it, they will think you are declining the scholarship. This is important!

My number one tip for planning to study abroad and for applying for scholarships is to stay organized. I keep a folder for all of the documents that I need and for what I might need. I also make multiple copies of all these documents because if you use it once, it is likely that you will need it again. Having extra copies make things easier and saves time. It is also nice to just have a record of everything that you are doing.


So now to the really helpful part. Here are a bunch of links to scholarship websites and scholarship search engines:
Gilman Scholarship
Boren Scholarship
Foundation for Asia-Pacific Education
Freeman-Asia
Global Studies
Associaton of Teachers of Japanese
Study Abroad Immersion
Study Abroad.com

These are just some links and most are for Asian study abroad sites. There are many more though, and it takes a lot of time to search through the internet to find them so try to put aside a day or two to do so.

For those of you interested in the scholarship I received, here is some information:
I was chosen to receive the Freeman Asia scholarship to study abroad in Japan for an academic year. It is a scholarship for those who are planning to study in the East of Southeast Asia. The maximum you can receive for one year is $7,000 dollars to be paid half in the fall and half in the spring. For a semester you can receive up to $5,000 and for the summer $3,000. You do need to do a service project for this scholarship.

If anyone has any questions about how to apply for scholarships, writing essays, or anything in general, please comment and I will try to help as much as possible. As a recipient of the Gilman Scholarship and as a student who has gone through this whole process, I understand the need to ask many questions, so please do so.