Will I Be Notified If I Don’t Earn a Scholarship I Applied To?

Will you hear about a scholarship rejection?

Flickr user rachaelvorhees

After applying for a scholarship, you just can’t wait for that all-important award or rejection notification to arrive informing you whether or not you won the scholarship. As time goes by, anxiety starts to creep in. You start wondering whether no notification means there is still hope or whether it means your application was not successful. The truth is it could be either.

There is no fixed procedure that governs scholarships. Just as every organization that awards scholarships has their own qualifying criteria, they also have their own selection and notification process. Some scholarship administrators send notifications only to successful applicants while others send out award and rejection letters.

Should you follow up on your scholarship status?

It certainly does not hurt to follow up. You can do that either by email or by making a call to the scholarship administrator or organization.

Before you do that though, you must go back and check the scholarship details. If the form mentions a deadline or a timeline of when the winners will be announced, you should wait till after the date has passed before you make that call or send that email. Contacting the scholarship organization any sooner wouldn’t be helpful, as they most likely wouldn’t have made their decisions yet.

If there is no deadline or timeline mentioned, you could go ahead and take the initiative to make inquiries. Wait for a couple of weeks before calling the scholarship administrator though. Most organizations receive numerous applications and it takes time to go through them all and assess each one. Again, if you contact them too soon, they most likely wouldn’t have selected a winner yet.

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