I Won Some Unique Scholarships and Fellowships; I Interviewed for Others. Here’s What I Learned

17 min readSep 29, 2019

Applying to the world’s top scholarships and fellowships that provide a full ride, housing, a stipend and even travel funding is an arduous journey. So, I want to give you some tips on how to win and show you what it’s really like to apply.

*Just a few things before we get started:

This article is most useful for those who are preparing for graduate level studies and need some cheddar (or a whole truckle). Some of the information in this guide is geared toward underrepresented minorities, most of it is not. If you found this article and you’re an undergraduate freshmen already preparing for some of these programs, then I’m jealous.

A Bit About Myself

I graduated from a top public university with a Bachelor of Science in an Engineering discipline. I am an underrepresented minority. My GPA was 3.2 and I won a full tuition fellowship for a Master of Science degree at a top 5 engineering program, I was a global Finalist for the Schwarzman Scholars program and I am currently applying to Stanford’s Knight-Hennessy Scholars program for an MBA. I spent a lot of time researching scholarships and I found several that cover the full cost of tuition and some that cover more. I have become quite familiar with the process of applying to programs like these and found that the same criteria for success is stated every major program. I will focus on programs like Schwarzman Scholars and Stanford’s Knight-Hennessy but at the end I will dive into some other programs as well.

Prestigious scholarships like Schwarzman Scholars, Knight-Hennessy Scholars and Rhodes Scholars offer comprehensive fellowships and scholarships to the best and brightest students around the world. This means that not only will they fully cover tuition, but they cover things like housing, travel and even provide a stipend. With that said, Scholarships like this are not easy to win. I applied to the Schwarzman program in September 2018, I interviewed in November and was rejected about a week after my interview. I learned a lot about applying to programs like this, what it takes to win and the wonderful experiences they can provide. But they are competitive. Schwarzman Scholars received over 2800 applications during my application cycle. They invited 300 people to interview for 200 spots in their class of 2020. I was one of those 300. This is what it takes to get an interview.

Leadership, Intellect, Character…

Every single scholarship or fellowship program cares about leadership. It is so important to highlight this in the applications. The National GEM Consortium, Knight-Hennessy Scholars, Harvard 2+2, Schwarzman Scholars, and The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management all require applicants to show leadership potential to be awarded their fellowships. Every major program like the programs I mentioned care about three things: stellar grades, a track record of proven leadership and community service or a socially conscious applicant. Don’t believe me? Let’s check out a few of their webpages on criteria.

Schwarzman Scholars: “What we look for… Leadership… Character… Intellect”

Knight-Hennessy Scholars: “Independence of Thought… Purposeful Leadership… Civic Mindset”

Harvard Business School (also 2+2): “Habit of Leadership… Analytical Aptitude and Appetite… Engaged Community Citizenship”

Rhodes Scholarship: “Moral force of character and instincts to lead… GPA of 3.70 or higher on a 4.00 scale, with no rounding. You are not eligible to apply with a lower GPA…”

Let me translate this for you. You must have excellent grades, a history of leadership or some type of stellar achievement and be socially conscious or demonstrate commitment to something bigger than yourself. And by stellar grades, I mean high. It was a miracle that I even made it to the Schwarzman Scholars interview with a 3.2 GPA. Most admitted students have a 3.7 GPA or higher and as you can see above, that 3.7 GPA will barely even let you apply to the Rhodes program. Former President Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar by the way, which leads me to…

Elitism

Many of these programs only require a bachelors degree, possibly a certain type of citizenship, an age limit and English fluency to apply. For the Schwarzman and Knight-Hennessy programs, there is no minimum GPA or minimum test score. At first glance, the eligibility requirements might make it seem like these scholarships are reasonably attainable. Let me tell you, they are not. When done right, the applications themselves are blood, sweat and tears. I spent an entire summer on my Schwarzman Scholars application, went to the interview, did everything right (maybe not everything, more on that later) and still got rejected. Despite the fact that most of these programs state that the reason they are comprehensive, fully funded scholarships is so that anyone can have access regardless of socioeconomic status, location or other circumstances, they are extremely competitive and out of reach for most people.

However when you really look into things, it’s clear they are looking for a very specific type of person. When I interviewed with the Schwarzman Scholars program, most of the other finalists were from top private universities or colleges. There were some students from top public schools here and there like UC Berkeley and others. Most candidates were from Ivy Leagues or other prestigious institutions. It became quite clear that the people who started the program were looking for their own kind:

“The program’s curriculum… was crafted by talented academic leaders from some of the world’s most prestigious universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, and Tsinghua.”

Right. Got it. Many of the students that I met at the Schwarzman interview were wealthy, went to top schools like Harvard, Yale etc. and already had the resources, influence and connections that most people do not.

The elitism is not present in every single program I mention in this article but for the big name prestigious schools and their comprehensive scholarships, it certainly is. Many of these programs boast about diversity but I noticed that many of the “underrepresented minorities” were in fact foreign and from wealthy families. A common factor among everyone was that they had done something that read like a news headline and they knew how to market it.

You Have to be Special

I was quite surprised at the quality of folks that they had interviewing there. Almost everyone had done something amazing. Since I am most familiar with their program, let’s look at Schwarzman Scholars again and check out their class of 2020:

“Schwarzman Scholars counts among the Class of 2020 a group of remarkable individuals including the writer of the winning essay that named the NASA Mars rover- Curiosity; a medical doctor who founded a science policy think tank in partnership with London City Hall and the European Commission; a documentary filmmaker; a Captain of the British Army Taekwondo team; the first Muslim elected official in Jersey City history; a classically trained opera singer who was also named Trinity College Dublin’s business student of the year; an activist who successfully petitioned the Obama White House to increase the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States; and a first generation college student who went on to become a NASCAR driver.”

They really, really want to keep writing about the quality of their admitted students. So if you want to be a part of the program, you have to highlight every single thing you can that shows your amazing uniqueness. For me, this meant highlighting leadership, Chinese language skills, my work experience etc. Yeah, I know, that’s vague. I did do some interesting things and I made sure to show them in the best way possible, but I certainly did not name NASA’s Mars rover, I did not influence Obama’s foreign policy, nor did I drive for NASCAR. Point being, make sure to go beyond just research and actually scour their website. Learn all you can about the program, their admitted students’ profiles and what’s new on the programs agenda. You should have a very compelling story, clear future goals and a list of signifiant achievements to get an interview with the program.

Interviewing

If you get selected for an interview, some of these programs will pay for you to travel to a location of their choice for the interview event. In my case, the Schwarzman Scholars program paid for my round trip flight to and from New York City, as well as two nights in a nice hotel. The Knight-Hennessy Scholars program will pay for you to travel to Stanford and participate in what they call “Immersion Weekend.” I attended a webinar from the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program this year and they spoke a bit about this. ‘Don’t be nervous, this is not the Hunger Games’ they said. Yeah, sure. I know better. I haven’t been to the Knight-Hennessy interview yet, but that’s exactly what the Schwarzman Scholars interview was.

Candidates for the Schwarzman program compete based on their citizenship status. The program takes a certain number of admitted students from the US, China (including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan *not part of China but Schwarzman has to appeal to the Chinese narrative if they want to keep their program and privileges at Tsinghua University*), and the rest of the world is in their own basket. Candidates in any of these three categories compete with each other for the limited spots in those categories. There were several people there who lied to each other about their citizenship. Why? Because candidates were regularly sabotaging each other in an effort to secure a spot in their prospective candidate category. By lying to you about their citizenship, they think you will be less likely to sabotage them and will let your guard down, ergo they will have more opportunities to sabotage you.

My Schwarzman Scholars Interview Experience

1. Group Exercise

During this exercise students are split up into teams where they play a game, solve a puzzle, analyze a news article etc. The exercise doesn’t matter but your behavior does. The purpose for the group exercise is to observe how you will function on a team. They are looking for the team players, the leaders, the domineering personalities and the people who do nothing during school projects. This is another place where candidates might try to sabotage you, make you look bad, etc. None of the dirty tricks actually happened to me (that I know of) but I observed it and I heard about it from other candidates.

2. Luncheon

This might happen before or after your interview. The program leadership will call everyone into a nice dining hall and then the billionaire founder of the program, Stephen Schwarzman, will give a speech. Some of my interviewers sat at my table along with other candidates and other staff in the program. This is another chance for them to observe you so watch your manners. They might challenge you, debate you, or they might be super cool and you can build a great rapport and it could help you later on; all of the above happened to me.

3. Panel Interview

Right before the interview, they take a small group of students to a room to have pictures taken, in the event that you are chosen for admission. After the photos, we all sat at a round table and Stephen Schwarzman came in and spoke with us. He basically tells everyone not to be worried, to relax and that the interview is just to learn more about you. For some people, myself included, that’s what it was for the most part. For others, the interview panel ripped them a new one. A girl from my university who interviewed a few years before was brought to tears and claimed she was verbally attacked and their questions had nothing to do with her qualifications or character traits. My experience was pretty easy. The interview is a panel interview of people who will sit on one side of a table and you will sit on the other. They ask you questions and you answer. These people are all important leaders. There were deans, CEOs, corporate board members, former politicians etc. General Petraeus was even on one of the interview panels. There’s not enough time for them to introduce themselves so you introduce yourself with a brief summary about yourself and then they will jump into questions. In the last five minutes they will ask you about an issue in current events and then they send you out. I personally was glad that they did not introduce themselves. It took a lot of the pressure off and I felt like I could be myself.

Not all is doom and gloom. I had a wonderful time meeting these amazing people within the program and I got to meet and sit down with Steven Schwarzman for a brief chat. Comprehensive scholarships that include housing and a living stipend along with tuition are highly competitive, and rightfully so. These organizations invest a lot of money into developing the best and brightest leaders of the future and they want to make sure they reach that goal. With that said, there are plenty of other scholarships and fellowships out there that will cover the full cost of tuition and even provide mentorship networks, internships and more. I’ll list some here and it will be up to you to see if they are a match for you.

Some Programs for Underrepresented Minorities

The National GEM Consortium: This is a fellowship for underrepresented minorities who majored in STEM in their undergrad and want to pursue a STEM graduate degree. This is how I was offered a fellowship to a top 5 graduate engineering program. This program will fully fund Masters and Ph.D programs to students that are admitted by member schools. If you are selected by both a member school and a member corporate sponsor, you will also get an internship during the summer after your first year in graduate studies and you might even win a stipend. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me.

The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management: Another one for minorities however actually being a minority is not a requirement, as long as the applicant can demonstrate commitment to their mission. This program seeks to increase underrepresented minority participation in graduate management study. This one is neat because it will allow you to apply to up to six different member schools (there is more than six member schools) with one application for a a flat fee of $300 for six schools and a lower cost for less schools. Considering that a normal MBA or other grad school application fee costs around $250 per school, one application with six schools for only $300 is a godsend. Who doesn’t want to save $1200? If admitted by a member school and selected by the Consortium, you will be offered a fellowship that will cover the full cost of your tuition and fees.

These are just a couple. There are many, many other opportunities for underrepresented minorities and women available. It just takes some searching.

Some General Tips About Applying to Grad School and Fellowships

1. Essays

If your university has a fellowship office or some other program that helps you prepare for prestigious scholarships, make them your new best friends. My university had an excellent fellowship application support program that provided me with an advisor, a writing specialist, mock interviews, access to past winning applications and finalist applications. Find out if your school has one and get in there ASAP. You need to have someone helping you and giving you feedback on your essays. Your essays should be memorable and they should take you a good amount of time to perfect. If the word limit is tight, it’s going to be tough to get all your good qualities in there and that’s where an advisor can really help. You also want to mention not just what you will get out of the program and how it will help you, but also how you will contribute and make the program better (What clubs do you want to join? Which faculty do you want to work with? What will you do while on campus in your free time?).

Some essay prompts will be kind of open ended and tell you “there is no wrong answer.” That is a lie. There is indeed a right answer which means there are also wrong answers. For example the Stanford MBA program had an essay prompt about “what matters most to you and why?” They say there is no right answer but if you look closer, the Stanford Graduate School of Business motto is:

“Change Lives. Change Organizations. Change The World.”

Hint, hint. If the school’s motto is “Change The World” then you probably shouldn’t write about your dog. Clearly they want to see commitment to something greater than oneself and a desire to make a positive impact on the world.

2. Letters of Recommendation

This is tricky because some programs require the letter to come from a recent supervisor, research professor, who you might not know too well. The best people to ask are the people who know you the best. Hopefully you have cultivated relationships early in college (hint for the undergrad freshmen). Everyone has a different situation and maybe you can’t get a letter from someone who has directly supervised your work, the best thing to do is to pick people that know you well and are willing to write you a fresh letter. If they use a template, that’s bad news bears. To optimize your application real estate, you should direct each recommender to write about a specific topic. For the Schwarzman Scholars program I assigned each of my three letter writers to write about either my leadership, intellect, character and to include specific examples or anecdotes of each. Its best if they write about things that aren’t already in your application somewhere.

3. Resume/CV

Focus on quantitive measurements and leadership. This means using numbers to explain your achievements whenever possible. Let’s look at a general example:

“Led X while at Y to achieve Z, resulting in an increase in Q of 25% and a savings of $10,000 for the organization.”

Now let’s compare two people. I think the Lily Zhang from the Muse does a great job of this:

“Person 1: Duties included taking field measurements and maintaining records, setting up and tracking project using Microsoft Project, and developing computerized material take-off sheets.
Person 2: Initiated and managed tracking systems used for the Green District water decontamination project, saving $125,000 on the overall project through a 30% decrease of staff allocation time.”

Clearly, using quantitative measurements is more compelling. They usually limit you to one page. That’s okay. As a general rule you should optimize your space by writing about something new in each area. Your essay might contain an anecdote from work, research, extracurricular activities or something else that is in your resume, thats okay if its crucial to your essay narrative. If it’s not crucial to the overall narrative, consider only having that in the resume. Remember they need to have a reason to interview you. Make them want to have you in front of them so that you can expand upon things in your resume.

4. Test Scores

It really depends on your program. Some programs will require test scores, some won’t. For the majority of people out there, this means taking the GRE, GMAT and maybe the TOEFL. As you have seen above, academics are important for every program in this article. These types of standardized tests are not my forte and I didn’t do as well as I hoped on them. I would recommend starting early, getting prep material and working hard on it over the summer before your expected application year for your program. It will be tough to focus on the application and the exams at the same time. The GRE and GMAT scores are both valid for five years so I recommend taking them early so that you can focus on performing well. I didn’t do this and I suffered for it.

5. GPA

Whoever said C’s get degrees never thought about going to graduate school. For the college freshmen here, don’t listen to this myth. Your GPA matters and as this world becomes more and more competitive, it will matter more. Many employers ask for your GPA, so if your boomer parents tell you “no one is going to ask about your GPA after graduation” don’t listen to them either. They don’t know what things are like for us lazy, entitled millennials. If you did a tough major like me and got a poor GPA, then you know my pain and the seniors with a sub-3.5 GPA reading this know it too. At this point in your academic career, your undergrad GPA can’t change much and after graduation, it won’t change at all. Start strong and finish strong, it will open doors for you.

6. Video Questions

Some programs will have you record a video of yourself doing something or talking about something. The best prompts will be open-ended and allow you to be creative or teach your audience something. For Schwarzman, I did a video teaching my audience how to do something in my favorite game. Several people on my interview panel said they loved my video and it stood out among the many videos of people who just stood there and talked. Be creative and do something different. Imagine being the application readers who have to sift through hundreds of applications, weeding out the people that didn’t put the time in, the people that speak in a monotone during their videos and the people that half-assed their applications. When they come across an interesting video, I guarantee you they will take a closer look at your applications and that raises your chances of your application going into the “Invitation to Interview” pile.

7. Interview

I found some of the questions challenging, some were even adversarial. I believe that every question can be used as an opportunity to tell them all of the things you want them to know about you. Don’t let the time run out without telling them all of your amazing qualities. It’s important that when you are confronted with a challenging question that brings up a weakness in your application, you own it and address it head on. If you use this as an opportunity to reflect on that weakness and mention what you have done to improve it or what it has taught you about your other strengths, that will be much stronger than shying away from the question or worse, being overly defensive. Try to build rapport with admissions officers and members of the program beforehand, you never know who will be interviewing you.

To write a winning prestigious scholarship or fellowship application, it takes time, effort, dedication (blood, sweat and tears). It can be a truly life changing experience though. Many people get burdened with huge piles of debt from undergrad, and then if they want to go to grad school but don’t pursue a Ph.D that pays them, they rack up more debt. An MBA or other graduate degree from a top school can cost $200,000. Don’t go down that path if you don’t have to. There are many options to win an amazing fellowship or scholarship that can change your life, save you a downpayment on a house and open doors to a caliber of mentors and classmates that you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else. Understand that applying to one of these programs is a serious time commitment, you might have to give up opportunities and a lot of leisure time, and there is no guarantee that you will be accepted. In fact, statistically speaking, there is a very low chance of acceptance. If you’re up for it, take a chance, do your research and apply. Which is better, a $200,000 bill or a several months of hard work that could change your life forever? Get to work.