Today we continued with what we were doing last time; trying to find scholarships that are supporting exchange students. We haven’t found as many as we hoped for, but here comes the last ones. “Axel och Sofia Alms stiftelse”; they give away scholarships for students that are studying in high school, but not at the university, and you have to be less than 23 years old. Perfect! Their only requirement is that you have passing grades.

For the next one we called to Kommunhuset in Partille to ask them what they have to offer. They told us that almost every commune in Sweden might offer financial support to students; but for different purposes. They recommended us that the easiest way to find out if you can get financial support where you live is to call the local office and put forward your mission. But they also said that it wasn’t very usual that they supported these kind of things, because there are people who need the money for “more important things than studying abroad” – (her words), but that you should at least give it a try.

The last scholarships we looked into were the ones that YFU offers; there are 3 different categories that you can apply for. The first one is for students that are going to Europe; the scholarship is for 10 000:- and the only requirement is that you have chosen a European country for your exchange year. They give away one (1) of these every year. The next category is South America and South Africa; the same concept as above, you have to have chosen a country in South America or South Africa itself in order to be able to apply for this scholarship. This is also one (1) per year, and it’s for 10 000:-. (Frida actually got this one when she went to Venezuela with YFU 2010 / 2011). The third category is for students with financial problems; it doesn’t matter what country you have chosen. They give away two (2) of these every year and it’s for 25 000:-.  We thought a bit about why they only had “special” scholarships for Europe, South America and South Africa, and not for United States that is the most common choice. But after thinking about it, it was pretty obvious; about 80 % of all students choose to go to United States, and therefore they are trying to make more people choose other countries by offering these scholarships. Kind of a smart trick!

Now we’re done with the research about the scholarships. We’re actually done with all the research what so ever for this project. The scholarships were our last “assignment”. So what’s left now is to start to put together the actual handbook, to make it easy for the reader to compare the different organizations. We also believe that the design is really important! And when we are done with the handbook we only got one small mission left; finding a printing office where we could print it in high quality!