This section on my website will be entirely dedicated to the Gilman schorlaship. From doubts to advices, I will offer answers through a series of posts. This, of course, will be part of my Follow-On Service project if granted this scholarship.
-"The Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program offers grants for U.S. citizen undergraduate students of limited financial means to pursue academic studies or credit-bearing, career oriented internships. Such international exchange is intended to better prepare U.S. students to assume significant roles in an increasingly global economy and interdependent world." -The Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship http://www.iie.org/programs/gilman-scholarship-program/about-the-program -"The Gilman Scholarship Program aims to diversify the kinds of students who study and intern abroad and the regions where they go. The Gilman Scholarship is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and is open to U.S. undergraduate students who demonstrate high financial need." To see if you are eligible, go to: http://www.iie.org/Programs/Gilman-Scholarship-Program/About-the-Program/Eligibility
The answer is: BE RESPONSIBLE!
The applying process is easy but it requires time. Hence why you have to be careful not to forget the deadlines established. You will have enough time to work on it. The first thing is: being able to make an account as an Applicant and carefully read what they are asking for. After, you may continue to fill everything. If you are missing information like your GPA score, you can save the application and come back to it later. Have papers in hand early! Especially the one about your bank account and your transcription with your grades. Go to the main offices of your university and ask for the transcription and your personal information. Normally, it takes some time for them to process all of it. A good thing to do is to read, on the Gilman's website, the tips and help sections. This will help you write good, orignal essays. In fact, you can ask help from students who have won the scholarship as well. Lastly, keep contact wih your study abroad advisor and financial advisor for their approval on the application. Withoutit your aplication would not be processed. Good Luck! Writing an essay can be stressful for a lot of people. It requires time and dedication and EDITORS! For a Statement of Purpose essay, such as the one required from the Gilman Scholarship, you need to be clear on what are you going to present in this essay that makes you worthy of such competitive scholarship. My advice is: have editors (either friends or professors) to proof-read your essay. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT. You may think you write well but the truth is that you will have grammatical errors and probably run-on sentences. So make an outline, make drafts, let them be proof-read. Most important of all, don't leave it until the last moment to start working on your essay. For more information on what to write for this essay here's the link to the FAQ page of the Gilman Scholarship: FAQ Good Luck! I leave you here my essay as an example: Throughout my whole life, I have been a dedicated student. My greatest dream has always been to expand my knowledge and experiences beyond the limits of my surroundings. I am a young woman from a Puerto Rican low-middle class family. Puerto Rico is a poor country where violence, drugs, and robbery threatens our daily life. The education I have received has come with a lot of sacrifices. My father makes minimum wage and my mother works all day on the streets as a physical therapist. They work hard to give their children the best education they can get. From them I learned I need to work hard and never give up on my dreams. My biggest fear has always been to not be able to achieve my goals in life. To continue living under such circumstances would mean that all these sacrifices were made for nothing. I refuse to believe that. I believe that as the first person in the family to study abroad, I can show my community that even when dreams look impossible to reach, it is possible to achieve your goals if you are perseverant. Being insulated in a small island has limited the opportunity of many Puerto Ricans to travel outside their own island, so it often seems that they are generally not very open to new ideas or different ways of doing things. I wish to be different and prove to myself I can do this. Since my freshman year at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, I knew I wanted to do something memorable during my university experience. Further into my undergraduate program, I started considering the idea of studying abroad because I felt it was a necessary part of my on-going maturity. If I was able to enter to the best university in my country, who says I can't study in another university with academic excellence as well? I don't think my social and economic status should determine where I should study. But instead my hard work should determine this. I invest most of my time in my studies and I am always in search of opportunities. I have always been an active student. I currently work as a community service volunteer at my Christian church and, in the past, I worked actively as the treasurer in my high school's chapter of the National Honor Society. Achieving academic, professional and personal goals is more than a hobby, is a lifestyle. I feel the need to improve myself constantly. As a future teacher, it is part of the characteristics that define an educator: never settle for less, always do what encourages you to be better at life. The same goes for my abroad program since I plan to get the most of it. Participating in such a program will enrich me as a language student. Currently, I have a first major in the teaching of English as a second language and a second major in Italian studies. For me, it is imperative for a language student to practice –beyond the classroom walls— the language he or she is learning. My experience has proven me that, even after taking the intensive and advanced courses in oral and grammar in Italian, my fluency is at an intermediate level. In spite of having excellent professors, my classes haven’t been enough practice to make me entirely fluent in Italian. This will be my chance to strengthen my language skills. A reason I will keep studying Italian is because it has helped me to make connections with other people around the world. In fact, it is one of the languages I will teach in my future classroom. Once in Milan, I will have the opportunity to take classes that will likely never be available at my home campus due to lack of professors in certain areas. I will have the chance to explore new areas in Italian studies and what better place to do it than in Italy. There, I can improve my language proficiency, obtain a complete cultural experience and a richer academic curriculum. This experience will help me to grow personally by helping me be more independent and handling my own finances, my time and studies in a foreign country. Professionally speaking, this opportunity will have positive outcomes in my future. Since I am studying to become a language professor, participating in a classroom in a foreign country as well as evaluating their education system, will help me amplify the ways I will teach in the future. It will leave me with a strong preparation and an extraordinary experience to undergo during my bachelor’s degree. I will be able to offer my new language and education skills at schools in Puerto Rico and in the United States. It is my desire, that with the help of Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship, I will obtain all these opportunities, which include being accepted into a competitive graduate program in Linguistics. With its help, my goals with the Italian language will be fulfilled; my knowledge of a new culture will expand and it will bring an opportunity to explore more cultures along the way. I will have better understanding of how this globalized world works. The program in which I will be studying abroad is the Bilateral Agreement between the University of Puerto Rico and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. Both universities will provide me with the necessary help to be able to study as any other student in the Italian campus. I will be attending the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy where I will be taking Italian courses that will help me gain knowledge of the Italian culture and will help me improve my fluency in Italian. My main goal in these classes is to become a specialist in the language that brought the Renaissance to life. So much can be gained from a language that is so old and diverse in the present world. From gastronomy to fashion, from literature to art, I will gain abundant experiences that I can share once I return home. This is the one time in life when I will be more open than ever to the diversity the world offers. Italy is going to open my eyes to a world of an industrialized city I have never seen before. Never have I been in a place where everything is new and different to me. The manners, their diet, and the different ways Italians go about their daily life are some of the many challenges I will encounter and I will be ready to deal with. Without doubt, I will be close to become a specialist in Italian studies as my second major requires it. What I wish the most with my study abroad experience is to carry it with me all my life and bring it as an example of perseverance to my future students and, most of all, my country. I love teaching, and even more, I love to help others learn how to communicate with the rest of the world and help them have an open mind to the diversity this world has. For me, a teacher is the person that forms its society. A country without a teacher is a country without a guide. I have a passion for languages more than anyone can imagine. My desire is to travel the world as much as I can and put those languages in use. Italy is a country that holds a special place in my heart. Being a place with so much history and that has influenced many countries, I can’t imagine passing through life without being there at least once and appreciate its wonders. Here's my Follow-on Service Project Proposal essay: (For more information on how to write this project go to: FAQ Gilman or Gilman Essay -Statement of Purpose-)
My proposal for the Follow-On project consists in spreading cultural awareness and how to break the barriers that fear builds in low-income student’s minds. As I mentioned in my Statement of Purpose, I wish to be different from other Puerto Ricans who have not had the opportunity to travel outside their own island. I wish the same for the students at my home campus, who come from a background similar to mine. My goal is to make them see, that it is possible to participate in a study abroad program and that it brings benefits that they can't get, by any other means. By participating on an international study program, they will have a broader perspective of what they will want for their future careers. Also, it will motivate them to do the same for others. They will want others to pass through the same experiences as well. It will create a chain reaction that will benefit future generations at my campus. Once back from Milan, I wish to show them the possibilities that await them out there. I will motivate them, by showing my personal growth, to get out of their comfort zone and explore their abilities in a foreign country and not just in the United States territory or places in Europe like Spain –where we share the same language. The target audience I am focusing on is the first year and second year students who receive financial aid and specially those who are taking languages classes. My purpose is to inform about the study abroad programs and the financial aid opportunities available, including the Gilman scholarship. Through me, they will learn how to successfully become exchange students. My main focus is to show them how I made my study abroad an exhilarating event in my life. This will change their way of thinking of how it could be an economic burden and will not overwhelm them while I explain to them the process of applying to the scholarships and the study abroad programs. I want to encourage them to the very end. I hope that through the information I bring them, they can make better decisions in their career lives and dare to explore beyond what they see as safe. I hope they start seeing the unknown as an opportunity of growing in life and not as a menace to what they have already achieved, as hard-working students. The way I am going to make this possible, is by contacting two organizations at my university: the International Studies Office and the Modern Languages department. Through an activity called Expo Lenguas (Exposing Languages), which is held on the first semester of each academic year, I will present my trajectory of my studies abroad. This event consists on inviting all the faculties on the campus to come and see what language students do during their bachelor’s degree. Here, language students present their experiences of learning languages and invite non-language students to dare and take a language class. Those who have participated in a study abroad program talk about their experiences. What I wish to bring new to this activity is the financial aid part. This has not been explained in depth in the past years. This is why I choose this activity as my place to present, in a different way, a study abroad experience. Both organizations participate and organize this event and are aware of the plans I have for 2014. They will help me gather my target audience by using emails as a way of announcing my presentation. On my return from Milan, I will offer myself as volunteer for the creation of this activity in the first semester of the academic year 2014-2015. There – through a series of documentation I am going to have in a blog created by me— I will integrate explanations of financial aid available at that moment, the Benjamin A. Gilman scholarship being the first.Additionally, I will present the step-by-step process of applying for the programs and, to make this blog even more attractive, I will include the photos and the videos of my time at Milan and other places I will be able to visit. The blog is going to be a recollection of my experiences gained thanks to the Benjamin A. Gilman scholarship and I hope to maintain it up to date while I’m in Italy. I believe that, by sharing my experience in such a creative way, it will give a clear view and it will motivate other language students to participate in future international studies. The blog will be also published in social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter. As we know, social media is used by the youth and this will be a good way to spread the word to other students who qualify for this scholarship. In that way, it will be easier, for students interested in participating, to contact me or see what help the blog offers to them. How will I reach these students before this activity? Upon my arrival, I will be contacting these two organizations to start working immediately. Hopefully, the Communication Office of my campus will promote the activity on the official campus webpage once asked for it. After that, it will take me approximately two to three months of preparation for the activity held in mid- October/November. In that time of preparation, I’ll be editing the posts of the blog that I have made while in Italy, generating more posts, helping the organizations prepare for the activity, and promoting with flyers at the bulletin boards of the Modern Language department and in the other departments and faculties as well. It is my desire that this project comes to life, because it will make the process easier to the students, compared to the hardships I have had during my process of applying for this scholarship and the study abroad programs. It is a fact that after this activity, more and more students will want to go on a study abroad program. |
DISCLAIMER: I am not an official representative of the Gilman Scholarship. Nor do I have connections with it except for being a recipient of the scholarship. All the opinions and statements made here are solely my own, and do not reflect those of the Gilman Scholarship.
PurposeCreated for the purpose of helping other applicants of the Gilman Scholarship. To inform & guide those who have never heard about it before as well. Archives
December 2014
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