the $50,000 scholarship is for educational purposes only
That’s not how I understood the scholarship when I read the information on the website.
The FAQ says
Scholarship money should be treated as “professional development funding” for award winners. This means the funds could be spent on things like professional travel, textbooks, technology, college tuition, supplementing unpaid internships, and more.
and
Once the student turns 18, they have two options:
Submit an award disbursement request every year, indicating the amount of scholarship the student would like to withdraw for what purposes. Post-undergrad, the remainder of the funds are sent to the student. This helps avoid scholarship displacement.
Receive the scholarship funds as a lump-sum payment sent directly to the student.
From this, I concluded that once the student turns 18, they can use the money for everything that could be defended as plausibly leading to their professional development.
If that’s the case, than though the scholarship is not exactly “no strings attached” as the OP claims, it’s still a description that to me seems closer to reality than “educational purposes only”.
I remember hearing that the money was just for the person and I felt alarmed, thinking that so many random people in my year at school would’ve worked their asses off to get $50k — it’s more than my household earned in a year.
Sydney told me scholarships like this are much more common in the US, then I updated that it’s only to be paid against college fees which is way more reasonable. But I guess this is kind of ambiguous still? Does seem like it’s two radically different products.
If you start from the premise that someone is trying to game the system, then since there seems to be no oversight on what happens after they choose to take a $50k transfer to their bank account it’s effectively no strings attached.
Don’t people have the option to take it as a lump sum? If that is the case, presumably if they are willing to game the system to get the money they will not be particularly persuaded by a clear instruction to “only spend it on education”.
Atlas Fellowship cofounder here. Just saw this article. Currently running a workshop, so may get back with a response in a few days.
For now, I wanted to point out that the $50,000 scholarship is for educational purposes only. (If it says otherwise anywhere, let me know.)
That’s not how I understood the scholarship when I read the information on the website.
The FAQ says
and
From this, I concluded that once the student turns 18, they can use the money for everything that could be defended as plausibly leading to their professional development.
If that’s the case, than though the scholarship is not exactly “no strings attached” as the OP claims, it’s still a description that to me seems closer to reality than “educational purposes only”.
edit: a typo
I remember hearing that the money was just for the person and I felt alarmed, thinking that so many random people in my year at school would’ve worked their asses off to get $50k — it’s more than my household earned in a year.
Sydney told me scholarships like this are much more common in the US, then I updated that it’s only to be paid against college fees which is way more reasonable. But I guess this is kind of ambiguous still? Does seem like it’s two radically different products.
If you start from the premise that someone is trying to game the system, then since there seems to be no oversight on what happens after they choose to take a $50k transfer to their bank account it’s effectively no strings attached.
Don’t people have the option to take it as a lump sum? If that is the case, presumably if they are willing to game the system to get the money they will not be particularly persuaded by a clear instruction to “only spend it on education”.