Dear Trustees, Donors and Friends,
Today marks the completion of our first phase of scholarships and relief assistance to be disbursed during the current fiscal year.
We have pledged over Rs. 100,000 per month in scholarship and relief aid for the next 12 months. This amount shall be distributed among 15 highly deserving young people. Of these, 14 are undergraduate students—7 at NUST, 4 at FAST-NU Islamabad, and 3 at FAST-NU Lahore.
The students were selected through a transparent and efficient process over a period of 6 weeks. Our awareness campaign had limitations of time and budget since we started late and were determined to keep administrative costs at zero. Nevertheless, we got excellent co-operation from the Universities mentioned and were able to reach a highly deserving pool of talented candidates in a very short time. We assigned each candidate a score based on need (50 points), academic ability (35 points) and quality of institution (15 points). In assessing the latter, we considered the University’s curriculum as well as reputation among students and employers. Our over-arching philosophy was to identify financially distressed young people who are doing well at reputable institutions so that they can find good jobs upon graduation and thus help their families and communities. You may witness the entire process of selection in the posts below and the Affidavit each recipient submitted is available here. Particulars of all 14 students are available in our office.
The 15th recipient is a young lady whose family suffered a string of recent misfortunes, culminating in the death of her father earlier this year. This family of 5 (a mother with two daughters and two sons) currently has no source of income and the eldest child is in danger of losing her admission at FAST-NU unless she can lighten her burden of debt to the University.
For next year, we are guaranteed to increase our funding of deserving candidates by about 20% to Rs. 120,000 per month. However, we estimate that the need of only the good students at reputable institutions alone is at least 5 times greater. We must therefore organise an aggressive awareness campaign over the next several months. Please do whatever you can in this regard. Action would be more valuable than advice because all our staff is volunteer and already over-worked. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Chairman
Decisions have been emailed to all applicants already. We are continuing to evaluate additional applicants and will notify them if there is an update in their status. We have so far awarded 17 scholarhips this year and hope to reach a figure of 20 if funding goes as planned.