Indian students spend nearly Rs.200 crore every year on international education.
A mind boggling sum it is, but that can be considerably brought down by availing scholarship opportunities.
Unfortunately, majority of them are neither aware of such scholarship nor the avenues to get the information.
Social initiative
That prompted a few youngsters to start a social initiative “WeMakeScholars.com” and this initiative promises to bridge that gap.
The idea germinated in the minds of Damini Mahajan, Arjun R. Krishna, and Vinay Nair took shape at the incubation centre of the BITS Pilani, Hyderabad campus.
The trio got the idea when they did their MS from University of Sheffield, UK, with two of them receiving fully-funded scholarship.
During their interactions they realised that many of their fellow batchmates from India didn’t even know about the scholarship.
“There was a gap in the available opportunities and information reaching to students. So we teamed up with few other friends studying in Europe and US, to start this,” says Damini Mahajan.
Website
The website ‘WeMakeScholars.com’ is a not just-for-profit social initiative. “In the last two years we have helped more than one lakh students and it’s all free,” says Ms. Mahajan. As of now the portal has listings of around 2,000 active scholarship from varsities across the world. It also publishes information on internships in the country and abroad.
Portal
Ms. Mahajan says the portal also connects the aspiring students with the successful scholars for guidance on various aspects such as application process, eligibility and writing scholarship essays that determine the success of the applicants.
“We also have more than 50 mentors who benefitted from the website and are willing to share their experiences.”
The portal was recently launched by former Union Minister Shashi Tharoor