Speaker 1: You don't have to panic if you've been offered admission without a scholarship or you have been offered admission, a partial scholarship and you're wondering how to take care of the rest of the cost of attendance. This video will give you the strategies you need to secure a full scholarship or funds to support your education abroad. My name is Fred, thank you for subscribing. This is The Fred Effect. Let's get started. This video is in two parts. First, I'm going to tell you the mistakes most applicants make that end up securing admission without a scholarship so that if you are yet to start your study abroad applications, you will avoid these mistakes. In the second part of the video, if you have secured admission, congratulations. Unfortunately, if your admission did not come with funding, I'm going to explain the various avenues you can explore to secure full scholarship or funds to support your education abroad. If you're ready, let's begin. So if you are yet to begin your study abroad journey, make sure to avoid these mistakes. The first one is, do not start your applications without finding out if the university, department or program you intend to apply to have scholarships available for international applicants or students. Listen, if you're applying to a university in, let's say, Canada or the US, most of the scholarships are in the form of graduate assistantship, research assistantship, fellowship or teaching assistantship. Not every department has such offers for international students. So you need to find out first if the department you're applying into have such scholarships available before you submit your application. So I know you'll be asking, how do you find out? And that leads me to my second point. Communication. Most applicants, before they submit the application, fail to communicate with the admissions team, the director of the program or at least a faculty member in the department you intend to apply to. Listen, to be considered for full scholarships, a lot of departments require applicants to get a supervisor within the department before they submit the applications. If you do this, it increases your chances of admission and scholarship. If you forget to do this before submitting your application, don't worry. You can still secure an advisor after you have submitted your application. Don't wait till your admissions are in. If you don't do this, you risk not gaining admission or gaining admission without a scholarship because a faculty member should agree to work with you to be considered for a scholarship. Departments that do not require that you get a supervisor would only ask that you talk to the head of the department before you submit your application. Now listen, every department you want to apply to have faculty members. Among the faculty members, there's somebody who is considered as the head of department or HOD or director of the program or program head. Different universities have different technologies for this. So all that I'm saying is that you need to reach out via email, express interest in the program, share your transcript and at least your CV. Ask about admission and scholarship availability in the department. If the department do not have such offers, they will let you know. If they do, they will also let you know. In that case, you save yourself the time and effort and sometimes money for application fees in applying later on you gain admission without a scholarship. In this video, I explain how you can navigate the website of almost every university to locate the director of the program or the head of department email address. Check this video out in case you need to do that. On my third point, it is important to know that some graduate programs are self-funded and as such the department do not offer scholarships to international students. Others and mostly the business related fields will make GRE or GMAT optional. However, to be considered for scholarships, you are sometimes required to submit these test scores. So even though you may get a GRE or GMAT waiver and especially in the business related programs, you are only considered for scholarship if you have a GRE or GMAT. So it means that if you are aiming at a full scholarship to fund your education, why not opt for other programs that will not require the GRE but have scholarship for international students. This is the fourth point. Sometimes within the application portal, applicants are asked if they will be able to fund their education if not considered for scholarship. Now if you go ahead and select yes, you may not be considered for scholarship because the admission committee may presume you can fund yourself. Again, most universities give applicants the opportunity to select either they want to be a teaching, research, or graduate assistant during the application process. Remember that it is important to select all these three because if you select a teaching assistant and unfortunately there are no teaching assistantship positions, rather there are research or graduate assistantship positions. Since you chose teaching assistantship, you may not be considered for other funding opportunities if there are no teaching assistantships available. Now listen to me if you are applying to an undergraduate program, especially in the US and Canada. The truth is that you can secure admission and a merit-based scholarship or a past year scholarship if you have a high school transcript, certificate, and reference letters or recommendation letters. But to put yourself in a better position to secure a full scholarship for an undergraduate program, you may be required to produce an SAT or ACT resource, even though it might be optional in the application process. So if you currently hold an admission for an undergraduate program with a merit- based scholarship or a past year scholarship and the university is not offering you a full scholarship, this may be the reason. If you have SAT or ACT, you stand a higher chance of getting a full scholarship which will cover the entire cost of your attendance to the university you have applied to. Now let's go to the second part of the video. If you currently hold admissions, congratulations. These are the options you can explore in order to get a full scholarship to fund your education abroad. So after receiving your admission notice, the first step you need to take is to accept the admission. Afterwards, you need to, as soon as possible, email the director of the program or the advisor you were assigned to if the admission did not automatically come with scholarship. A lot of admission notice, especially to the US and Canada, automatically comes with assistantship or scholarship offers. Unfortunately, not all of them. So once you've been offered admission into a program, quickly email the director of the program, express gratitude for being considered for admission into the program. Then you ask whether you'll be automatically considered for scholarship or you have to submit a separate application to be considered. If the department automatically considers applicants for scholarship, then they will let you know when scholarship or funding decisions will be made. Again, if you are supposed to submit a separate application to be considered or be interviewed separately to be considered for the scholarship, they will let you know. So I know at this point you are saying, Fred, what if I email my department yet the director says that there are no scholarships available? Well, that's a good question. That leads me to my next point. If your department has no scholarships available, then you should explore other scholarship opportunities or assistantship opportunities in the university. A lot of students have their scholarships or funding from a different department in the university and not necessarily the academic department they gained admission into. Currently, I am one of them. In my previous university, the department I gained admission into offered me a teaching assistantship opportunity. But in my current university, I am being funded or my scholarship comes from a different department and not the department I gained admission into. So how do you get such scholarships? And that is my third point. So as an international student, the major department you'll be interacting with apart from your academic department where you gain admission into is one, the International Office and two, the Graduate Office or the Graduate School. The International Office is responsible for all the activities of international students. So the issuance of I-20, the designated school official, CPT, OPT and all those things are done by the International Office. So if you have gained admission without a scholarship, this is what you should do. Email the International Office. Let them know you've gained admission into a department in the university. Unfortunately, your department do not currently have scholarships for international students. So one, can they employ you as a graduate assistant in the International Office or what are some of the scholarships available for international students that they, the International Office, would recommend that you apply to? In the same way, you can email the Graduate Office which is responsible for graduate students and of course, if you've gained admission to an undergraduate program, email the International Office and the Graduate Office. You let them know, especially if you're a graduate student, if they can employ you as a graduate student and fund your education or two, are there any graduate scholarship opportunities the Graduate Office or the Graduate School can recommend to you, an incoming graduate student to apply to? Listen, I have a lot of friends who are currently working at either the International Office or the Graduate Office of their school. Shout out to my sister Akushika at Northern Arizona University. She is one of them. Before I move on to the next option, I know this video is opening your eyes on a lot of things. It will mean a lot to me if you support the channel to grow. Please do me a favor by clicking on the subscribe button. If you like the video, apparently it helps YouTube to recommend this channel to others. It will be great if you click on the notification bell so that anytime a new video is uploaded, you'll be the first to be notified. In the comment section, please let me know if these tips have been helpful so far. If you're a current student studying anywhere around the world, let us know how you secured your scholarship. Did it automatically come with your admission? What time duration did it take for you to get your scholarship after your admission? Your input will seriously help our brothers and sisters who are currently on their study abroad journey. Thank you. Now let's move on to the next strategy. Now moving on, almost every university has an employment website. Most of the assistantship opportunities available in the University of Gain Admission Tool can be found on these employment websites. So once you hold admission, you qualify to apply to any of them. So visit the employment website of the university and apply to as many as you can. So this is how some of the employment websites look like. Let's move on to the next option. Almost every university has a financial aid office. The purpose of the financial aid office is to provide financial assistance and eligibility awareness to all current and prospective students as they pursue their educational goals. So financial aid is money that helps pay for the cost of education, that is college fees, books, and supplies. So if you hold admission without a scholarship, then you have to reach out to them. So get the email address of the financial aid office in the University of Gain Admission Tool. Simply tell them that you are a prospective student and you need help securing scholarship to fund your education and they will be glad to help. Now this is my next strategy. You wouldn't be the first person to study in whichever university you've gained admission into. There are certainly some international students who are studying in sometimes even the department you've gained admission into. So since you have an admission, please do this. Visit the website of your department or the university and reach out to any of the international students who are currently schooling in the university. Remember these students have already been on the path you are now traveling and they can give you some inside information that can really help you to secure a scholarship. At least they can share their successful journey in securing scholarship in the university with you. If you are finding it difficult to reach out to a faculty member, these people are already in the university. So they can assist you by walking to the office of the professor you want to reach out to and have a conversation with them on your behalf. So if you visit the website of the department you've gained admission into, you can find their pictures, email addresses, and names of current students in the department. So do well to reach out to them. Let's move on to the next strategy. Before we move on to the next strategy, it is important to note that I'm giving you as many avenues as possible. So if the first one does not work for you, the second, third, or the subsequent ones may work for you. So bear with me. Let's go through them. On the next strategy, once you gain admission into a university, quickly search for the department or the university's social media platforms and follow or subscribe to all the handles of the university or the department you've gained admission into. So this includes but not limited to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and most especially LinkedIn, and of course Twitter as well. Most important announcements and sometimes scholarship opportunities are posted on LinkedIn or on the social media platforms of the department you've gained admission into or on the university's social media handle. So if you follow or subscribe, you may be the first person to find an opportunity that will lead you into landing a full scholarship to fund your education. Now talking about social media, I share very insightful information on my social media pages and that is the quickest way to get in touch with me as well. So this and every Saturday at 20.30 GMT, we can have a one-on-one conversation on Facebook. If you are not aware, simply go to Facebook and search for the Fred Effect or TFE, follow the Facebook page, and let's get interactive. I am very active on Twitter. My Twitter account is verified, so check for the verification mark, follow the handle, and send me a direct message and I'll quickly respond. This is also the Instagram page. Just in case you are not on either Facebook or Twitter, this is the Instagram handle. On TikTok, I post short videos on scholarships and application fee waivers. It will be great to get in touch there too. Finally, as an international student, you can secure an educational loan to fund your education abroad. I will suggest that you make the loan your last resort since, you know, you have to pay back. So there are a lot of companies ready to give you a loan to fund your education. I will only mention eight of them in this video, but there are more. So this includes Empower, Juno, Prodigy Finance, Ascent, Discover, Ernest, PenFed, and Credible. I'm going to share the links to the website of these institutions in the video description in case that will be your last resort. Quickly, let me clear this erroneous impression. A lot of people are of the view that the chances of a prospective student to secure a visa is slim if they are being funded by a loan company. There is no proof for this. In fact, I have had opportunity to assist a lot of students who are currently studying abroad on a loan secured from some of these companies that I mentioned. They were successful at a visa interview and so will you. Also, depending on whichever country you want to study in, these are country-specific scholarships that you may want to consider. In Japan, there's a MESS scholarship. In Germany, there's a DART scholarship. In Singapore, there's the SINGA award. In France, there's the AFEL scholarship. In Hungary, there's the Stipendium Hungaricum. In Korea, there's the Global Korea scholarship. And of course, in the UK, there is a Chevenin scholarship. There's also the Land University scholarship in Sweden. There's the Switzerland-Swiss government scholarship. The Ireland government has an Ireland government scholarship. There's a Commonwealth scholarship, Erasmus Mundus scholarship, and also the Fulbright scholarship that you can consider. So finally, listen, and I tweeted this recently. Ideally, we all expect the study abroad journey to be like you secure admission, you get scholarship, and then you go ahead to secure your study permit or your visa. In fact, this is the case for most international students. However, the study abroad journey is not this smooth for everyone. The bitter truth is that some prospective international students secure admission, they get a full scholarship. Unfortunately, their visas or study permits get denied. In the same vein, some students will gain admission, they will get no scholarship or partial scholarship, and their visas or their study permits will be approved. It is when they get to the campus or their destination country that they explore other scholarship opportunities available. I know you are worried that you gain admission and now you don't have scholarship or you have a partial scholarship. The admission alone is a big deal. A lot of students around the world apply to the same university you've gained admission into, and you were considered. So you have to celebrate for that and take the opportunity with or without scholarship. So if you are watching me right now, you have admission with a partial scholarship and you are saying it's not enough, listen up. If you have a bottle or a cup filled with water to the middle, you can be optimistic and call it half full or you can be pessimistic and call it half empty. I would choose to call it half full and I entreat you to do the same. Push through and be positive. You will definitely be fine. Understand that some assistantship and scholarship opportunities can only be applied for when you are on campus. So under no circumstance should you lose hope or be discouraged because you have gotten admission without a scholarship or you have a partial scholarship. In Canada, as at the time of recording this video, international students are allowed to work full-time, earn good money to sponsor the education. In the United States, you have up to 20 hours to work on campus as a student. If your department has put you on a wait list, be positive. Not everyone who has gained admission into the same university you've gained admission into would eventually accept the offer or attend the university. The unfortunate thing is that a lot of people apply to different universities, they gain admission with scholarship, they choose one university to attend and they do not inform the universities they are not going to that they cannot make it. So these scholarships that are presumed to be taken will be available when you have finally been able to push through to get to campus. So keep pushing. There are more opportunities. Occasionally, some students secure admission and scholarship into the same university or a department you were not offered scholarship. Unfortunately, they are unable to secure the visa. So if you are able to secure a visa and get to campus, the assistantship is a job. So it will be definitely be offered to you if you finally make it to campus. Listen, you need to do this. If you don't push yourself through, nobody can. Friends, my name is Fred. Thank you for subscribing. I'll see you in another video. Please be positive. Everything will be fine.