For external scholarships, I received the Coca-Cola Scholarship, which is $20,000. From Vanderbilt University, I received a full ride which is $60,000 per year, or $240k over four years and from Rice University, I received $25k per year which amounts to $100k over four years. I committed on May 1st to Stanford University. While I haven’t fully decided on a major yet, I’m thinking something along the lines of finance and computer science, or maybe statistics. Stanford gives you the leeway of choosing after your first or second year, so everyone goes in undeclared at Stanford. So I’ll probably decide on my major in the next couple of months.

For the Coca-Cola scholarship, all I did was go online and google search “prestigious scholarships for high school students” and that showed up amongst the top 10, I believe. \ There are several scholarships out there And I think I was pretty late to the game but thankfully Coca-Cola rang the bell. So I got pretty lucky. Applying for scholarships has two pointers to it. The first tenant is that it obviously gives you a good head start for applying to colleges because the process is more or less the same: essays, interviews, recommendation letters, GPAs, and extracurriculars and all. So it kind of gives you a head start on the college admissions process. The second one is that it’s free money on the table so it would be kind of foolish not to go for it. Especially if there are people, organizations, and nonprofits that are providing scholarships of 1000s of dollars, and it just takes a couple hours to apply, I think that it’s definitely a great opportunity. Coca-Cola’s scholarship offered a higher amount of money compared to others. They offered $20,000, while the other ones were more like $250, $500, and $1000. I heard a great deal about the Coca Cola scholarship network, because it’s been 34 years since they started. That’s what really motivated me to apply for the Coca-Cola scholarships.

For the Coca-Cola scholarship, they mentioned outright that the first baseline is that you have to be academically outstanding. So that’s a given that we all probably know of when applying to scholarships. In terms of academics, I did research at Harvard and in terms of sports, I actually played badminton for over a decade, and I was ranked number one nationally, prior to COVID. I’m not too sure the effect of that on scholarships–in terms of college admissions, I could say that it probably helped–but in terms of scholarships, they usually say that those are merit-based. Anything involved with academics, research, extracurriculars, and community service are the top three qualities that one should have in order to get the scholarship.

The second one that they look for is community service. I had a nonprofit that I did, and I also started this initiative back in India related to widows. A couple of my friends and I started an educational nonprofit prior to COVID and so we like to help kids in the entire nation, who are underprivileged and teaching STEM to them, which I think is very, very popular amongst nonprofits, especially in this area. I actually had a friend in Nigeria, who was at a coaching center nearby for badminton. So I contacted him and then I started this shoe drive initiative over there and  we expanded from education towards athletics and combined both of them. In India, there’s a tradition where when one’s husband passes away, the widow is sort of stripped of their rights in the sense that they’re seen as worthless or outcasts in society. This was common in Indian society in the past few centuries but in recent times, it’s slowly been changing, transforming for the better. So in certain, low-income, poverty-stricken areas, that tradition still exists, so I partnered with an organization that helps out by raising awareness amongst the community, who are not really aware of these types of dehumanizing traditions.

One thing that I would do if I could go back, would be to really try to learn about these scholarships in the summer of my junior year because I think I started a bit late to the game. A lot of people had this sort of information a lot earlier. And to be quite honest, I applied for the Coca-Cola scholarship a couple of hours before the first stage was due because I didn’t know about it. So I wish like, you know, if I had realized a month or two in advance, the number of scholarships that I could have applied to would have probably been higher and the amount of money I could have gotten would have been higher. But at the end of the day, I feel like it’s very important to start early, especially for scholarships. With colleges like Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, everyone knows about these schools. But scholarships have more limited Intel and information. So if you really could start early, it helps a lot.

I committed on May 1st to Stanford University. While I haven’t fully decided on a major yet, I’m thinking something along the lines of finance and computer science, or maybe statistics. Stanford gives you the leeway of choosing after your first or second year, so everyone goes in undeclared at Stanford. So I’ll probably decide on my major in the next couple of months.