As someone who has won a scholarship to study abroad, I feel like I am (somewhat) qualified to give future applicants some advice. This post is really just advice for people applying to YES Abroad and CBYX (those are the two scholarships that I applied to and won), but I'm sure it can be applied to others, including NSLI-Y (I never finished that app...oops!), as well.
When filling out your application, make sure that you give yourself plenty of time to write your essays and host family letter. I recommend writing one at a time. It may also be helpful to have someone look over your essays. It's not something that I did, but most people do so. In addition, be sure that you are honest in your letter and essays. That might sound obvious, but please make sure you do that because some people try to make themselves look better on paper, which doesn't really work out well for them.
Teacher recommendations are just as important as the part of the application that you fill out, so be sure to give your teachers plenty of time to complete them. Just like you and I, teachers get busy and forget stuff from time to time, and you don't want them to forget your recommendations!
Once you are done with your application, you will wait a couple months to hear about your status. If you a a semi-finalist, congratulations! The next part of this process is the interview. In my opinion, it's the most nerve-wracking part, and I'm sure that pretty much every other applicant will agree with me. The most important thing to do during your interview is to breathe and try to pretend that you're just having a conversation with the interviewers. (I do admit that it's kinda hard to do when they're writing things down and looking for questions to ask though.) If you read some of my previous blog posts (CBYX - YES), you can see that I definitely was not confident once I was done either interview. However, I won both scholarships, so they couldn't have been too bad! Anyway, just be sure to answer each question truthfully and to the best of your ability. There will be some hypothetical questions, so don't get thrown off by them!
Along with your individual interview, you will also have a group evaluation or two. I personally liked the evaluations for YES Abroad better because they were more fun, but the CBYX one wasn't bad either! The evaluators simply want to make sure that you can work well with a group of people that you don't really know. Don't be shy, but I wouldn't suggest completely taking over the whole thing either.
After the interview, the only thing left to do is wait. I definitely suggest trying to keep your mind off of notifications until the day it actually happens. It's really hard to do, but it helped me focus on my ACT. In case you don't know, YES Abroad notifications started coming out while I was taking the ACT, and I had no idea until I was finished! I'm glad it worked out that way though. I don't think I would have been able to focus on the test if I had known that I could have gotten a notification at any time.
I should probably end this before I continue rambling about my acceptance...you can read more about it here.
That's all for today folks! Once again, feel free to contact me with any questions.
Selamat tinggal!
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