Financial Generosity of Schools

[WriterGirl]

I'm well aware even infamously stingy schools like NYU offer one or two full rides each year, but those are the special and rare cases.

In more usual circumstances (only partial help, smaller scholarships, TA positions, campus work, etc), how generous would you say your school is? Did you get offered help? Did they seem genuinely interested in helping you? Did you accept their offer? Did you decline it? Are you a US citizen, or international?

There isn't a lot of widely available info on this topic, so I'd love to hear what your experiences have been

 

[danieldrummond]

For international students, our best bet is to apply to scholarship programs in our respective countries. Depending on where you live, Fulbright could be an option. I know they offer 3-full scholarships (tuition, airfare, living expenses, monthly stipend, health insurance) to Brazilian students who want to study Screenwriting in the US, so maybe they have similar programs for other countries. May I ask where you're from?

The Institute of International Education is a great resource to find programs such as these. http://www.iie.org . Their Study America program helped me fund most of my expenses for undergrad.

Aside from that, you're up to the aid of individual schools. USC has the International Artist Fellowship, which covers all expenses to emerging artists from Asia and Latin America. There is no way to apply to it, however. You just apply to the program and hope the faculty nominates you for the award.

At this point I've spent about 3 years of my life total looking for scholarships and grants to cover my film studies in the US, Europe and Australia. It's hard (sometimes really hard). But there always seems to be a way. It just may take a bit longer than expected to find it.

 

[WriterGirl]

@danieldrummond Would you mind chatting with me via email or something else? I'd love to hear your insights and also learn about your experience, but I rather do it privately, so I can disclose more specific info (PM me your email, maybe?)

Unfortunately, I've been looking for help for years as well, but without much success, so I figured my best shot was hoping for school help AND combining it with local government loans (which are ridiculously expensive and limited to an X amount, but what can you do...). Which is why I'm interested in knowing which schools are regarded as somehow generous in order not to waste time and money with the stingy ones.

I also would like to know about the kind of help others got offered so I can really analyze wether my aid + loans plan could potentially work for a specific school, since some can offer 30K+, while others won't go over 8K a year and that last option wouldn't work for me.

I can outright tell you Fulbright is not an option for me. They're full of BS, have a TON of strings attached, AND are also not interested in supporting screenwriters where I am (I got this told by them outright last year during their application period).

 

[danieldrummond]

@WriterGirl I've PMd you my contact info.

 

[Lundun2017]

I'm well aware even infamously stingy schools like NYU offer one or two full rides each year, but those are the special and rare cases.

In more usual circumstances (only partial help, smaller scholarships, TA positions, campus work, etc), how generous would you say your school is? Did you get offered help? Did they seem genuinely interested in helping you? Did you accept their offer? Did you decline it? Are you a US citizen, or international?

There isn't a lot of widely available info on this topic, so I'd love to hear what your experiences have been

Hi new to the site but can you expand on if you were able to get the funding that you needed as i'm going through the process myself