“Just wanted to inform you that your admission package will be leaving our office tomorrow. I held your package back because I was hoping to include an additional letter. Please see the attachment.”

This was the email that I received from Ed Bustos, director of international admission at Rollins College, while I was waiting to hear back about my early decision application. To my surprise, the attachment was an invitation to participate in the school’s Alfond Scholarship competition, which awards up to 10 admitted students full tuition plus room and board. The competition takes place each year on the Rollins campus in Florida on the last weekend of February, and is based on interviews, class discussions and essay writing.

I had never been outside the borders of my country in my whole life. Even worse – I’ve barely been outside the tiny Kathmandu valley where I live, except for a few times to visit relatives during festivals. Now in a month I was going to go to Florida – all alone – with complete strangers – all alone – to compete for scholarship money that could make or break my college career – all alone.

It was one a.m. when I got the email, and I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night.

After a few days, I got another email with the schedule of the competition, travel arrangements, and some articles that I had to read prior to my arrival. I wasn’t entirely sure at this point what I was meant to do with the reading materials – I thought maybe they were preparation for the class discussions or the essay writing – so I started researching the articles and their authors and made some brief notes for myself.

The arrival

A month later, after getting my visa from the U.S. embassy, I arrived in Orlando, Florida. K.C., an Alfond student (that’s what Rollins calls someone who has won the scholarship) who is also from Nepal, and who would serve as my mentor, host and interviewer for the competition, picked me up at the airport. In the 15 minutes it took to reach the college, it felt as if I was in a movie. I had never witnessed such clean streets, or roads with no motorbikes on them.

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Applying for scholarships can be a lot of work.  Many require lots of paperwork, including essays, transcripts and recommendations.  Getting all that material together on time, and keeping it all organized can be a challenge.  This guest post comes from Scott Johnson, the international student advisor at North Hennepin Community College (NHCC), who has collected some advice for making that process a bit easier.  Here’s what he has to say:

Group photo of the student award recipients who were recognized at the NHCC Foundation Scholarship Luncheon on August 21, 2012 (Photo: North Hennepin Community College on Flickr)

One college event that is always a highlight of my year is the annual scholarship luncheon. This is the event that recognizes recipients of scholarship funds given out by the NHCC Foundation Office, a charitable organization affiliated with the college. I have had international student advisees among the recipients for all the years I have worked at the college.

In the 2012-13 scholarship cycle, five of my 70+ advisees were selected for awards. I was lucky enough to sit at a table with three of them at the luncheon when they were recognized for this achievement.

After talking with this year’s scholarship recipients, I gained a new appreciation for how much work actually goes into applying for this scholarship, or any scholarship. Many of the recipients had developed personalized strategies for successfully managing the scholarship application process.

Here are six of the most important scholarship management strategies students have shared with me, as well as some of my own tips developed through working with students over many years. My hope is that this information, together with other advice that you receive on the topic, will help you maximize your chances of being selected as a scholarship recipient at whichever college or university you attend.

1. Start early

Often a scholarship application will require you to submit an essay highlighting your past achievements. It will be easier to write this essay if you already have a collection of relevant content that can be woven into the essay. For this reason, I suggest that students start gathering relevant content in advance of the actual application submission cycle.

Tip: Maintain a folder and add to it any documents that recognize your excellence and achievement in academic, extra-curricular and community-related activities.

2. Anticipate delays

Scholarship applications, particularly those for larger amounts of funding, will likely require multiple components such as essays, letters of recommendation, and transcripts. For some of these documents, particularly recommendation letters, you will have to rely on others. By starting early and allowing yourself plenty of time, you – in turn – maximize the chance that others will be able to fulfill your request before the deadline. Planning ahead will provide you with a cushion that can be used to offset any unexpected, but often inevitable, delays.

Tip: Work backwards from your deadline to construct a timeline for assembling your application. Consider using an electronic calendar platform – like Google Calendar or Apple’s iCal– to track your progress. Often these calendars can even email you reminders of the deadlines you’ve set for yourself.
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Thanks everyone who participated in our Q&A event this week.  I hope it somewhat made up for the lack of real webinars happening in the world!

Our last question comes from Hana, who asked:

are there any medical scholarships for international students?

Hey look! It's a stock image of a medical person for a post about medical school

I have to admit, medical school is not an issue we’ve ever covered on this blog, and as I started to research this topic, I found out why.  Going to medical school in the U.S. as an international student is pretty difficult.  So much so that Yale University warns international students thinking of even pursuing a pre-med track as an undergraduate that:

It is extremely difficult for international applicants who are not citizens or permanent residents of the United States to gain admission to U.S. medical schools. … International applicants who are considering a career as a medical doctor and hope to receive their education at an American medical school should think carefully before applying for admission to an undergraduate program in the United States. (Yale University admissions)

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Screenshot from the Department of Education's College Affordability and Transparency Center

The U.S. Department of Education recently launched a great new website, the College Affordability and Transparency Center, designed to help students get information about the cost of an undergraduate college education.

One of the neatest features is a little tool that lets you look at lists of institutions with the highest/lowest tuition and highest/lowest net prices. The net cost lists are particularly interesting – they take into account all the costs of attending university (tuition, fees, housing, books, etc.) and subtract the average amount of aid received in order to find out the true average cost for a student.

But international students beware. That list of net costs only applies to domestic students – and for public colleges, it only applies to in-state or in-district students. Some colleges DO offer a lot of aid to international students, and make an effort to keep the net cost low, but they may not be the same colleges that offer a low net cost to domestic students or state residents.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the top 10 highest and lowest net cost lists you’d get using the college cost tool, and the top 10 for international students, based on our calculations.  You can see right away that the results are quite different for international students.

1) Lowest Net Cost

4-year Private Non-Profit Institutions:

4-year Public Institutions:

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