STP Syllabus

Personal Analysis
Certain capabilities are crucial for succeeding in your scholarship application, no matter which scholarship board. The beauty of these core skills is that you can acquire them from the classroom settings; responsibilities you hold in school, or in your everyday life experience, and apply them to another. For this reason, these skills are often labelled as "transferable skills". Teamwork, leadership, initiative, adaptability, communication, analytical and organisational skills are valued across many fields and can be developed through education, extra-curricular activities and hobbies.

The STP will review scholarship organisations' most sought after attributes. Which you choose to highlight depends on the particular requirements of a scholarship board, its academic expectations from its scholars, and its culture of each organisation you are targeting.

Writing Skills - Personal Statements
Undergraduate school admission committees look to the essays and personal statements for additional insight about the applicant's motivation, experience, and vision. As an Ivy League Admissions Officer puts it, "I want people to have some idea why they want to spend $100,000. I want to know where they've been, what they've learned, and why they want to pursue this path." Likewise, the sponsoring organisations would want to know more about the special qualities of each individual application in order to reach their final decision on who the scholarship recipients should be. Personal statements are an opportunity to share important information about the applicants in a distinguishing way. This workshop offers participants a look at their personal statements and a chance to think through their strategies and their plans for completing this important part of the application.

Interviewing Skills: How to Get that Scholarship
Interviewing skills can either "make or break" your chance of receiving a scholarship offer. This workshop will focus on the dynamics of conducting a winning interview. Topics include how to effectively prepare and research for an interview, and how to handle difficult and "illegal" questions. This workshop will also provide strategies for students who wish to "free" their voice. The focus will be on increasing self-confidence and managing anxiety of the interview process through discussion in a supportive group context.

Presentations Skills
Confident presentation skills are proven to pave the way for career success. Whether you will be making presentations to clients or colleagues, you will master the basics of creating and delivering a confident presentation. This dynamic, two-hour workshop will be divided into two sections: The first hour is constructed to help you organize your presentation material. The second hour is focused on the delivery of your message, as 93% of the success of your presentation is not based in content, but in the manner in which you deliver your content. Interactivity is encouraged.

Aptitude Testing
Many sponsoring organizations use aptitude tests as part of their selection process. The tests are usually pencil and paper or computer-based and have multiple-choice answers. Aptitude tests (usually timed) aim to measure the skills needed to be successful in a challenging university environment or even at the career stage. They are designed to measure your intellectual capabilities for thinking and reasoning, particularly your logical and analytical reasoning abilities. This module will be focussing on the verbal and numerical logical reasoning aspect and also diagrammatical reasoning skills (which is still rather uncommon at present). Many applicants would welcome the opportunity to find out what selection tests involve.

Team Building Exercise
For the purposes of awarding scholarships, assessment centres are increasingly being used by more organizations to evaluate a candidate's skills and competencies (such as team working, leadership, initiative and other inter-personal skills). Through specific group tasks or case study workshops, students are examined on their range of competencies required to work towards a solution. Many candidates often misunderstand the objective of the sponsoring organisations - it is not so much as being able to produce the best solution to a given problem or task; in fact, the most crucial factor lies within the process of working towards the solution. This module comprises of both a lecture and a workshop and will allow students to explore the dos and don'ts in this particular stage of the scholarship evaluation process.