Tough Competition for JPA Scholarships

Ranking: 5 Students

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Posted by Chong

A reader has left an interesting comment in the post entitled ‘My JPA Scholarship Interview Experience’. Since my thoughts on his or her comment are long enough to be put into a post, I post it here. So please read the comment first before reading this post.

Dear Supremacy,

Thanks for your constructive comment. After reading your comment, I have a few thoughts as stated below.

First, I don’t agree that about 30% of the straight 1As students are nerds. I think that 2% is a more reasonable percentage. Even if they were nerds, I don’t agree that they weren’t short-listed for JPA Scholarship Interview. Why? The reason is simple: JPA worry that straight 1As students will make complaints or newspaper headlines when they were not short-listed for the interview.

Bear in mind, last month when The Star reported a straight 1As (12 1As) student, Albert Wong failed to be short-listed for JPA Scholarship Interview, Public Service Department or Jabatan Perkhidmatan Awam was under high pressure. Finally, with the help from Cabinet members, Albert was awarded a full scholarship without even having to attend a scholarship interview!

Although you might argue that it was a special case since Albert is a student with special needs, I do believe the same happy endings will happen to all straight 1As, average students when they make the newspaper headlines. For the less fortunate 3834 straight 1As+2As students including myself, if we fail to win the JPA scholarships, we could do nothing but to accept the evil truth.

Next, it’s true that many top SPM students have secured some other famous scholarships like ASEAN scholarships, Petronas scholarships and Tenaga Nasional Berhad scholarships to name a few. However, many of them still applied JPA scholarships and went to the interview too!

During my JPA scholarship interview, I met two top students who were already awarded Petronas scholarship and Inti College’s scholarship respectively. One of the questions I have raised during my conversation with them is ‘Why do you apply JPA scholarship since you have already secured such a nice scholarship?’ Both of them give me the same simple and straightforward answer, ‘JPA scholarship is the best scholarship and I wish to study abroad without paying a single dollar’.

In my conclusion, competition for JPA scholarships is extremely tough. Only time will tell if this is true.

Best wishes,
Cupid

PS Don’t hesitate to leave your contact details like blog’s URL or email address in your comment. 8-)

Update: You can check the JPA scholarship application results now. I failed to win JPA scholarship. Only two straight 1As students from my school have secured them. The competition was really tough. The annual drama begins...
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