Personal Analysis—Knowing What You Are Good At and How To Use It To Your Advantage
Certain capabilities are crucial for succeeding in your scholarship application or any other form of application process that requires the demonstration of your soft skills. The beauty of these 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 STS will also 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. At the end of this session, you will begin to question what competencies you possess, how to identify them and which can use to gain that competitive advantage.
Writing Skills
Undergraduate school admissions 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 ideas 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 applicant 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 module offers participants a look at their writing skills and a chance to think through their strategies and their plans for completing this important part of any form of application process; what to include and what not to include in the open-ended questions section of any application form.
Aptitude Testing
Many sponsoring organisations 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.
Interview Skills—How to Get That $200,000 Scholarship
Interviewing skills can either "make or break" your chance of receiving an offer from the organisation you are applying to. This module 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 session 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.
Presentation Skills—How You Make a Case for Yourself
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 module will be divided into two sections: The first section is constructed to help you organise your presentation material. The second is focussed on the delivery of your message, as 93% of the success of your presentation is not based on content, but in the manner in which you deliver your content. Interactivity is encouraged.
Team-Building Exercise—How to be the Perfect Team Player
For the purposes of awarding scholarships, assessment centres are increasingly being used by more organisations 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 will allow students to explore the dos and don’ts in this particular stage of most competency-based evaluation process.