Scholarships and fellowships are more than a way to get money to pay for school. These funding opportunities present a chance for you to refine or re-chart the course of your studies, to integrate study abroad opportunities into your curriculum, to reflect on yourself and where you are headed, and to challenge yourself to go beyond what you thought possible.
As a convention, scholarships generally refer to funding for undergraduate studies, while fellowships are awarded for post-baccalaureate study. Often, however, these terms are used interchangeably.
What matters most is that there are myriad opportunities and awards. Some are specific as to discipline or area of studies. Many target a specific undergraduate class year for applications. A few place high priority on community service or on publishable research.
Across the board, all scholarship applications engage the student in a rigorous process, one of careful reflection and exploration of that student's most important aspirations. While working through the various components and stages of a fellowship application, students invariably develop a more nuanced sense of themselves and of their most closely held values.
Fellowship applications, by definition, commit students to a highly competitive process, as there are always far fewer awards than there are applicants. In no way should this discourage a Marist student from applying. A cursory review of well-known fellowships and scholarships reveals that there is no neat typology of schools whose students routinely receive awards. More to the point, Marist undergraduates are increasingly applying for and succeeding in their pursuit of these outstanding opportunities. Along with a steady string of Fulbright recipients, a Marist student has been awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship even as another earned a Goldwater Honorable Mention; two students achieved finalist status for the highly competitive Harry Truman Scholarship in the same year; other students have won the Gilman Scholarship for study abroad. This inventory is not comprehensive and will surely grow as more Marist undergraduates accept the challenge of the exceptional.
