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15 Jul, 2019

Internship Scholarship

Internships abroad programs can be quite costly. You need to plan your budget if you want to face all the expenses of such an amazing experience. An internship scholarship is the golden ticket in terms of funding.
The difficulty with scholarship programs is that many people don’t know about them in due time. Therefore, they miss opportunities for internships abroad thinking they cannot fund this project.
In this article, you will discover the different types of scholarships available, how to search for them and get some tips for the application process.

How to Search for an Internship Scholarship

First of all, you need to check with the international department of your university if you have one, because they are usually the ones who have the most thorough information about funding programs available.

There are many tips for you to find a suitable scholarship program to fund your internship abroad. Publishing a long list of scholarships here is not the best way to help you. Indeed, scholarship opportunities will depend specifically on your project. They can either be provided by your country of departure or your country of arrival, that’s why you need to let us know about your project here.

The fastest ways to find scholarships are:

Scholarship Search engines: They will make an inventory of the funding programs available, depending on your project. Be careful, a lot of them only apply for study programs and not internships.
Scholarship Research tips (Key Words): You can simply search on the web directly, using some key words like “Internship abroad Scholarships” “Internship abroad Grants” “Fellowship funding Programs” etc... by changing the language as well.
Facebook Groups: They are underrated but can be very efficient for finding information about funding methods or cheaper alternatives in your target country. You can search for internship groups or international groups in the city/country of your internship.


Types of Scholarship Programs

There are two main types of scholarship providers, namely public and private providers.

Public scholarship providers include State organs and other public organizations. You can search for those funding programs:
• On different scales: national, city or region and International if you are from an economic zone like the EU.
• Some universities have also their own scholarship programs so you might want to get in touch with them.

Private scholarship providers are the most numerous, but they are also the trickiest to find, as some of them are only available once and others are not always well known:
• Associations & non-profit organisations: Their purposes are diverse, some of them are here to help merit Student with low social background through affirmative action, or to promote international experiences. You can start looking in your community & at the small scale in your city.
• Fellowship programs: Being accepted in those private communities will expand your network, and they often have funding programs like the Rotary club

 

Tips for your scholarship application

When you have found your scholarship program and you are eligible, don’t lose too much time. You will most likely be asked to present a cover letter for the program and a budget forecast of your expenditures.

For the cover letter, you can start by presenting yourself and putting this internship into its context (mandatory for your studies or just for your career). Then you can explain what value will you get from this internship, on a professional and personal level, and why it is important for your future. At last, you should talk about why you need this funding.

To complete your application or just to assess the cost of your internship, you will have to make a budget. For that you can use an Excel sheet and create a board.
You start on top of the board with a row for your funding resources, followed by the expenses (both do not have to be equal). The easiest way is to make a monthly budget, multiplying each cost by the number of month you will be abroad. Even though you will have greater costs at the beginning (fixed costs), you can divide them in order to spread them all along the length of your stay. By the way, this is a forecast, so you should not stress about accuracy.

Don’t forget, the early bird gets the worm. Try to get information as early as possible and apply quickly, even though you didn’t find your internship yet. And most importantly, don’t hesitate to ask questions for students who had the same experience as you in your university or elsewhere.