How I Got $225,000 Scholarship from University of Toronto & How You Can Too

Today, I am going to be sharing everything that helped me get a two hundred and twenty five thousand dollar scholarship from one of the most prestigious universities in the world, University of Toronto and how you can get one TOO. If we convert this amount to Indian Rupees, it’s approximately ₹1.4 crores, which is Insane 🤯

Now, you might be thinking, that’s great, but
how did you apply?
what is the process?
what can we do to get it?

Do read the post till the end and hopefully all of your questions will be answered. Ok, let’s get started.

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U of T’s International Scholar Award

First things first, the scholarship I received is known as the University of Toronto International Scholar Award. It is a merit-based, automatic entrance scholarship offered by University of Toronto.

As the name suggests this award is given to International students, but only admitted international students who have applied to either the Faculty of Arts and Science (including Rotman Commerce), Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, U of T Scarborough or U of T Mississauga.

What’s interesting about this award is that you don’t need to apply for it, meaning you just need to have received an admission offer from one of the faculties and campuses I mentioned before and you’ll be automatically considered for the scholarship. This is the reason I have mentioned, at the beginning of the post, that I received a 1.4 Crore scholarship without applying for it because I didn’t have to submit a separate application for it, just submitting my main application was enough for my profile to be considered for the scholarship.

On a side note, if you are selected for this scholarship, you’ll be notified by the respective faculty through an email. I received my scholarship email on 6th April 2021, but this date can vary depending on when you apply to the University.

Benefits of the Award

This scholarship gives us an amount of 180,000 Canadian dollars over the course of four years of study and if the awardee decides to pursue a five-year undergrad degree, the amount increases to 225,000 Canadian dollars. Basically, every year only $45,000, from the scholarship amount, can be used to pay the tuition. So, $45,000 for four years will be $180,000 in total.

Now, let me break down my annual expenses which are for the fall of 2021 and show you how much you’d have to pay after receiving the scholarship. Before that, I want to warn you that the expenses I am about to tell you should be used as an estimation because the tuition and the living expenses might change depending on the year you are applying in. I recommend you to use U of T’s Financial Planning Calculator to see the latest breakdown of the tuition and expenses for your year of study.

So for the fall of 2021, U of T’s annual tuition fee is about $59,300 and if we subtract it with the annual scholarship amount of $45,000, it gives us approximately $14,300 or 8,56,000 Rupees to be paid. If we take into account the expenses of housing, health insurance and books which are $16,000 or approximately 9,61,000 rupees, it gives us a total of $30,300 or approximately 18,17,000 rupees to be paid every year.

I’ve used a lot of numbers here 😅 but if you’d like to know all of this through visuals and graphics, you can watch my video on the same post down below.

Overall, this scholarship covered almost 60% of my total cost of attendance this year, which is huge. But remember that if you are an international student the total amount you’ll have to pay will depend on the conversion rate of Canadian dollars to your currency, which may change in the future.

For more information, I highly recommend you to read the General as well as the Scarborough-Specific Terms and Conditions of this scholarship.

Now that you know what this scholarship is all about, let’s move onto how YOU can become one of the recipients of this scholarship even though this scholarship doesn’t require an application, interview or anything else.

Academics are the Key

My first and most important advice would be to focus on your academics.

I believe that good high school grades are the only key to unlocking this scholarship because U of T’s believes it too. They keep emphasizing that this is a merit-based scholarship. For instance, if you go to the Award Explorer and search for international scholar, you will notice that every faculty that offers this scholarship has mentioned academic performance to be the determiner for receiving the scholarship.

Moreover, my scholarship letter says that “This scholarship is awarded to incoming full-time international students on the basis of merit” which means that they will only look at your academic achievement and overall academic standing.

Also, there is one more thing which proves that only Academic performance matters for this scholarship. It is the Terms and Conditions in my scholarship offer letter which stated that, “Award renewal is based on your academic performance” and “this award may be withdrawn due to unsatisfactory academic performance.“

If you’ve read my previous posts, you might know that I didn’t have excellent extracurricular activities or great application essays. What I had was good high school grades and high final exam scores which I think made me a recipient of this scholarship.

So, what do I mean by good high school grades?

Generally, a score of eighty percent may be good enough for your admission to U of T but not good enough for the scholarship given the increasing number of applicants that apply to U of T with high scores.

University of Toronto’s International scholar award is a little competitive because only a selected number of students receive this award, which means that if your scores are consistently below 80% you will likely not receive it. Therefore, aim to consistently score above 90% in all of your exams but if your scores are not in the 90s, try your best gradually improve your scores with every exam and reach in the 90s. If you are able to do this, you’ll have a very high probability of receiving this scholarship.

If you’d like to know my grade 11th and 12th scores , you can watch my How I got into U of T down below 👇

Start Early, Apply Early

Moving onto my second tip, which is to start the whole application process early on and apply as soon as the university starts accepting applications.

The college application process doesn’t start when you start filling your applications; in fact, it starts when you are choosing your high school subjects. U of T mentions that one of the reasons why students are not admitted to U of T is they, “did not present a senior level/Grade 12 course in all prerequisite subjects required for program(s) they applied to” and that they “have an insufficient number of available courses at the time of consideration.“

Therefore, find out all the prerequisites for your area of study and the specific programs you are applying to and choose your subjects according to them.

I also encourage you to apply early on and well before the application deadlines listed on the website because
1. U of T starts evaluating applications as soon as they receive them, so your application will be in the first pool of applicants which have higher acceptance rates for admission as well as scholarships and
2. The spaces for most competitive programs starts filling quickly and they may be completely filled even before the application deadlines.

Submitting your OUAC App. is not enough

Tip number 3, OUAC application is not enough.

Do not rejoice after submitting your OUAC Application because there are two more things you need to do
1. Self-Reporting your high school grades and
2. Submitting your Supplementary application.

Most applicants delay their acceptances just because they delay the self-reporting of their high school grades and the submission of the required documents and the supplementary applications.

Moreover, it is not only important to self-report your high school grades but to update them on the portal as soon as new scores become available.

This is a very common sense thing if you are applying to U of T, but I mentioned this because I only got to know about self-reporting my grades and submitting my required documents when their alerts started showing on my Join U of T Portal. So I feel that if you know these things in advance, you’ll be better prepared to ace them.

If you’d like to know about the application process, the supplementary application, video interviews etc. in detail, I highly recommend you to check my previous videos.

If you’re like what is supplementary application, what do we have to do in the interviews, don’t worry, just check out my previous post to know more about them in detail.

Check Here 👉 How To Get Into University of Toronto + My Best Tips | Admission Requirements, Academics and more.

Save Money Via Research

BECAUSE U of T International Scholar Award is a little competitive and only a few students are offered this award, I would recommend you to NOT PUT ALL OF YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET. seek out more ways to finance your studies. One way is to find other U of T scholarships.

The first thing you need to do is to head over to U of T’s website and look at the scholarships available. Figure out which ones you are eligible for by looking at all the scholarship eligibility criteria because every scholarship is different and has different terms and conditions.

There are soooo many scholarships that University of Toronto offers, exactly 5105 different scholarships for local, Canadian and international undergrad students which means that there is a very high probability that you can win at least one of these scholarships. A lot of applicants will automatically be considered for most of these awards, but be sure to browse through the various opportunities, as some do require applications.

So what I recommend you to do is to go to the U of T’s Award Explorer, it is a tool developed by University of Toronto which will help us in finding funding opportunities based on our background and achievements.

So once you are on the Award’s Explorer, you can filter the 175 pages of awards by typing the Program name or Award name with the single keyword search filter, you can also filter by faculty, college, admission status, citizenship, type of awards and whether or not you have to separately apply for the award.

I recommend you to not put too many filters because together they might block even those awards that you might be eligible for.

When I was applying, I changed the award type to admission, citizenship to open to international, nature of award to All and Application required to All.

Once you apply the filters, the 175 pages of awards will reduce a lot. After that, you can check these scholarships one by one and decide whether or not we should apply for them.

For me, it was quite easy to filter the awards as I needed 100% financial support and so I ended up applying to Lester B. Pearson Scholarship, a fully funded scholarship program for international students. I talk more about it’s application process, tips and strategies in the one of my other posts.

Check Here 👉 How To Get Full Scholarship at University of Toronto as an International Student

Also, do remember that most awards can be combined except a few awards, so apply to as many as possible and apply even after you are admitted to U of T because you never know when these awards might collectively help you save thousands of dollars.

U of T Scholarships are not sufficient except one

Now, what I am about share is not something that will help you get a scholarship but something very important to keep in mind. University of Toronto says on their Awards Page “the value of scholarships is rarely sufficient to cover all costs the student will incur while attending University of Toronto”

If you are an international students, please know that U of T has only one scholarship program which fully funds the education of international students. It is the Lester B. Pearson Scholarship and apart from this, there isn’t any other scholarship program which provides 100% scholarship to international students.

Therefore, it is very important to plan your expenses before hand and not be in an illusion that your scholarship at U of T will cover everything or that you have sufficient budget to study at U of T because in these Covid times, things are drastically changing and so are the expenses. Hence, have a clear, written breakdown of costs and update them if you see them changing.

Conclusion

With that said, I would like to thank you for sticking around till the end of the post. Please write I am a Champion in the comments below to helps me know that you’ve read the full post.

If there is one thing you takeaway from this video, it would be to focus on your grades and try your best to keep them above 90%.

I think this is enough for now, I hope you learned a lot from the post.

Again, Thank you so much. See you Soon 😁