This spring TARGETcourses ran a competition giving away five
bursaries, each worth £2,000 for students pursuing a postgraduate course in the
2013/14 academic year in the UK.
To enter students had to answer three
questions in no more than a total of 1,000 words. This year the questions were:
-
How will postgraduate study contribute to your
career goals?
-
How will your postgraduate experience and
qualification benefit the community, the economy or indeed any other person or
group?
- Apart from academic knowledge, what else do you
expect to learn from postgraduate study?
The competition proved very popular, with more than 1,000
entries. And to make sure every entry was given a fair chance, the TARGETcourses
team was busy for more than two weeks thoroughly checking each one. There was
even a panel of judges involved!
After all this hard work five worthy winners were announced:
Alexandra Khageeva, Kayla Song, Stephanie Watts, Fay Hart and Mahwish Batool.
Judging by the popularity of the competition, it is clear funding
is still a major issue when it comes to postgraduate studies. We asked the
winners to comment on whether they had found it hard to secure funding elsewhere
and their comments highlighted just how difficult it is.
Fay Hart responded, ‘I
have found it exceedingly difficult to gain funding elsewhere, as it would seem
the majority of bursaries are course-specific, or a steady work placement has
been required to contribute to the sponsorship of postgraduate studies.’
Kayla Song said, ‘After
I came back from Haiti at the beginning of summer, I realised that all the
major funding institutions had already selected their scholars. This made me think
seriously about whether to proceed with my application status. Moreover, there
were relatively few awards for students coming from North America, which was discouraging.’
So how have our bursaries made a difference?
Stephanie Watts comments,
‘It has made things so much easier and has meant I do not need to work or get a
bank loan, which I really didn’t want to do. I did struggle to secure any other
funding. There were no scholarships or charity bursaries available from the
university that I was eligible for, so it was all my own savings, and that was
obviously not enough for the tuition fees and living costs.’
TARGETcourses is very happy to have given five students the
opportunity to continue their studies and we do hope this can be repeated next
year. However the is a bigger lesson to be learned here. Opportunities are out
there and motivation and determination will get you results, as winner
Alexandra Khageeva comments: ‘… it is good
to know that if you have such a goal as mine and work hard to reach it, there
is someone outside who is ready to help you.’
If you are searching for funding, make sure you check out
our funding database, the largest funding database in the UK.
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