“I lost the Scholarship Because I didn’t ask the right questions”

What would you do if you won a full scholarship to study abroad, and then lose the opportunity because you thought you had it all figured out?

You lose a life-changing opportunity simply because you refused to seek advice from experienced persons.

This was once the experience of one of the scholarship winners I recently discussed with.

Right after my Secondary Education I got a scholarship to do my bachelor’s abroad in USA. But because I did not ask the right questions I went to the embassy on two occasions and fumbled, and then I wasn’t given visa. I cried but it took my mom’s pacification to make me write Jamb and then I got into FUTO [Federal University of Technology, Owerri] and continued..

 

Notice how devastating this experience would have been.

This was from someone who got a scholarship and lost it.

What about getting the scholarship in the first place? Because that is what this article is about.

It takes knowledge and information to win a scholarship or even several scholarships.

Most people want to keep doing the same thing and expect different result.

But people who make the best of opportunities seek out people that know what they don’t know. And learn from them.

“If you want to know what lies ahead, you ask those who are coming back”

– Chinese Proverb

Think about the opportunities you could have missed because you didn’t learn from people who have experience in that space.

At AfterSchoolAfrica, we are curious about what people do with the information we put out.

On one hand are people who win these opportunities, on the other hand are people who are confused about how the process works.

We got curious to know what makes winners stand out from everyone else.

So, we reached out to FIFTEEN scholarship award winners and someone who has been in the selection process.

We invited these award winners across Africa (from Uganda, Tanzania, DR Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria and other African countries) from diverse background, discipline and level of study to reveal what they have learned in the process.

These people have won awards from the following institutions and organizations

Some of them have won multiple scholarships and awards to fund their education and projects.

Chuka was one of the 15 award winners we interviewed. He had learned from his experience. By the time we spoke with him, he had won multiple awards:

• ITS Student Essay Competition;
• The NICTA Research Project Award (NRPA);
• High Achievers Scholarship and Developing Solutions Award, University of Nottingham (Masters);
• University of New South Wales International Student Tuition Free Scholarship, Australia (PhD); and
• UNSW International Student Research Stipend Scholarship (PhD)

Another professional we interviewed had won the Mandela Rhodes Scholarship and the Commonwealth scholarship. And also worked as Scholarship Application Assessor for Canon Collins Scholarship.

And several other young Africans like them.

How do the same people keep piling success upon success, while the majority struggles to get just one opportunity?

What is the difference between people who have been struggling for years to get these opportunities…

…and the people who seem to be raking up success after success?

Were they more intelligent than everyone? Was it about habits? Mindset? Were some people just born luckier than others?

When we spoke to these award winners individually, the similarities in their revelations were astonishing.

One after the other, each of them proved that scholarship winners don’t win by accident; neither are they ‘Einsteins’.

They are everyday young men and women who took deliberate actions and made organized set of decisions that prepared them to win. They invested their time productively to complete applications that highlighted their strengths and presented them as candidates deserving of scholarship.

Multi-award winners recognize the importance of knowing what they can bring to the table and how to bring it to the table. They don’t rely on luck. They rely on their effort and understanding of the process.

We discovered that what makes these students stand out can be thought and learned.

And if you are as determined and ambitious, you can match their achievements; even better.

It took my team and I years of researching, networking and studying to learn the skills that separate winners from everyone else.

And, we’ve put everything we learned from these FIFTEEN Award winners into the New Edition of The Scholarship Digest 2019 – which Includes Over 1,400 opportunities for Africans worth 0.7 Billion USD

You no longer have to keep guessing what works and what doesn’t.

With instant access to over 1,400 carefully selected scholarship and award opportunities worth 0.7 billion US Dollars in your hand right away…

No need to spend tones of time searching online and getting overwhelmed in the sea of information. You dive in right away.

Enter Your details below to download Chapter One of The Scholarship Digest.

You can also get it on Facebook by sending us a chat from the Facebook Messenger Chat Icon 

Full details on how to get The book + The Audio Interviews with Successful Multi-Award Winners will be available next week.

Stay tuned!

In the meantime, be among the first to look inside. Download Chapter One.