Regarding Scholarships

Some notes about my scholarship(s). After receiving the acception letter from my university (not Kyoto) I started looking for scholarships to finance my year abroad (at least partially). There were several options to choose from since most scholarships are exclusive:

• Baden-Württemberg Stipendium
• DAAD One year stipend for academic students
• JASSO scholarship of the Japanese government

I applied for all of them. The first and “easiest”, was the BaWü Stipendium. The deadline was sometime in February and just two months later I received a letter stating that I was accepted. No further questions. The application was especially easy because I had already submitted most of the required documents for the initial application and my university relayed the application for me.

The DAAD scholarship is the best-known one in germany. So it would be a bit more difficult to get this one. I applied though their online system. It took quite a while for an answer to come. The letter I got congratulated me on getting through the first round and invited me to a personal interview in Bonn. Non negotiable. As a poor student without car I spent literally the whole day taking the train from Karlsruhe to Bonn and back. The interview itself took short of 20min. A day well spent. Nonetheless worth it as I got a message of acceptance two weeks after that.

Almost sad, I had to cancel the first scholarship, because as I said, the scholarships are exclusive of each other.

The last one was by far the easiest to apply for. On the application to the Kyoto university was a check box I had to tick if I wanted to apply. Guess what I did.

That’s all folks!