You’re finishing up college and you never want to see the inside of another classroom again—but in today’s job market you know that Grad school is a must, in your field at least. You’re not ready to go back to school just yet though so instead you’ve been gathering up vacation catalogues and looking into costly loans and travel credit cards because you’re ready for a one in a kind experience, the adventure of a lifetime, a travelling extravaganza—you’re ready for a gap year. Before you put yourself $20,000 more dollars in debt why not consider something else. The Fulbright scholarship is a government paid grand program that will pay for you to conduct research abroad. It’s like if all you had to do your senior year was your senior thesis, and you got to do it somewhere cool, like France! So you won’t be spending a year doing nothing but relaxing and soaking up the sun on foreign beaches. You’ll gain a much more rewarding experience studying something you’re passionate about—and you’ll save money.
Traveling is expensive. Plane flights alone can reach past a thousand, and if you’re not working for a year, how do you expect to pay that? You’re an adult now, neither Mom nor Dad, or Uncle Sam, is going to shell out big bucks to pay for your schooling, or your dream getaway to Greece. Traveling right after College, for a whole year anyway, just isn’t practical—you only get six months before you have to start paying off the loan debt you accumulated from you undergraduate degree.
Whether you decide to go back to school, or go straight out into the workforce, the Fulbright scholarship is going to give you a butt ton of experience you didn’t have before. The research you conduct could even establish you as an expert in your field. I mean what employer is going to say no to someone who the government threw money at to do their job?
You know how if you have an unproductive summer vacation—or even winter break—you return to school unsure of how to hold a pencil? Taking a break from higher education to do nothing will be a lot harder to pick up again. You’ll return to Grad School not knowing what a library or essay is. If you do the Fulbright scholarship though you’ll have plenty of raw fresh experience and your skills will have increased which is helpful because if you thought you’re bachelor’s degree was hard wait until you go for your masters.
The Fulbright scholarship isn’t like college where you have to take a bunch of classes you don’t care about to get your degree. It’s a research project you’ve specifically designed yourself about something you’re passionate about and want to know more about. You won’t be spending a year working a dead end job, or tanning your brains into mush, you’ll be doing ground breaking work that will benefit the world!
Some rapper once said ‘you only live once’ and before that Robin William’s proclaimed Carpe Diem! So Seize the Day because YOLO. How many people get to say they went to a foreign country and did something meaningful? How many people designed their own program of study and then did it?! The Fulbright scholarship pays you to live and enact your dream for something—something that should be beneficial to others. What’s more fulfilling than that? That’s a life well seized my friend.
