Today the Social Security Board held its 22nd annual scholarship award ceremony. 167 students from all over the country applied, and 44 were awarded at the high school and Associates level. For those students, it's a chance to get a quality education without worrying about the financial burden.
And SSB's communications manager, Vanessa Vellos, told us about this year's recipients.
Vanessa Vellos, Comm. & PR Manager, SSB
"The stories that impressed me a lot were students who aspire to be teachers, to work in the environment, to be programmers - they come from backgrounds that some of them their parents may be struggling a bit financially, but they aspire to improve their economic situation. They aspire to be independent and it's not just to get a high school diploma or even a 6th form education. They want to be contributors of our society, productive members of our society. So that is what overall impressed me from this years' cohort."
"You need to maintain a good GPA or have a good academic performance. For example, for high school you get $1,200.00 each year for the 4 years and you have to maintain a B+ average and then for the Associate Degree level you have to maintain I believe 3.0 GPA and you get $2,000 and so the maximum that you can get from that scholarship is $4,000. Once you keep working hard maintaining a good average, you will maintain your scholarship and you can look forward to basically not worrying about finances. Because each year school fees are due and parents are like what will I do and how will I deal with it. So all you need to do is just focus basically for the next 4 years and if it's an associate degree level, next 2 years their job is to be a good student."
"It'ss a great feeling of satisfaction, it's a great feeling of joy - it's all positivity at the end of the day. Paul Lopez is one of our scholarship recipients and he is a public figure and you see him in the media. He's quite a success story there. Also our guest speaker today who was Miss Emogene Habet. She's a former scholarship recipient. You also have Renata from Channel 7's morning show, she is a scholarship recipient and so those are the more public figures. Of course, you have those who are not so public, but they are still productive members of society."
The scholarships went to 28 high schoolers, 15 - sixth formers and one vocational student.
|
