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Apply for Global Awards

What Are Global Awards?

Global awards are highly-competitive, merit-based opportunities that are conducted at a national or international level. Some of the best-known global awards include the Rhodes Scholarship, Fulbright Scholarship, and Gates-Cambridge Scholarship. Some awards, like those three, fund further study after your NYU Abu Dhabi education.

There are others, like the Dalai Lama Fellows, Future Global Leaders Fellowship, and Clinton Global Initiative - University, that are more experiential in nature, and which accept applications from students while they are enrolled at NYUAD.

Our goal at NYUAD is to help you identify your passions, interests, and future paths, and then work closely with you to identify global awards competitions that will help you pursue those goals.

What Kind of Support Does NYUAD Offer for Students?

We offer an active, hands-on, individualized approach to advising our students and alumni who are applying for global awards. We maintain a roster of about 40 awards for which we actively recruit, reaching out to currently-enrolled students who we think might be a good fit for the criteria each foundation has set out.

Then, we work one on one with those students to determine whether a given award is right for them, and then help them at every stage of the application process.

NYUAD is the only school in the region with a full-time staff member dedicated exclusively to helping candidates prepare their global awards applications. NYUAD is also a member of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors in the USA, and actively contributes to and participates in international conversations around global awards advising, in order to constantly stay on top of the latest information and news around this topic.

The most obvious reason to apply for a global award is because you are interested in the opportunity offered by the funding organization, and you want to participate in their program.  However, because there are many more highly-qualified applicants for these programs than there are positions available, and selection processes are necessarily subjective in nature, students should mostly focus on the benefits of the application process as the mean reason for applying.

Here at NYUAD, we put the emphasis not on the outcome of the global awards competition, but on the process of applying. We believe that there are significant and important benefits from going through the process of applying for a global award, whether or not you are selected to receive such an honor.

  • Greater self-knowledge
  • A plan for life after NYUAD
  • Excellent writing samples
  • Increased interview skills
  • Outstanding letters of recommendation

Just because we put the emphasis on process over product, though, does not mean that we do not think about or care about winning. We do! We work very hard on an individual basis with scores of students every year to help them prepare the best possible application, and to present themselves as well as possible in interviews. The difference is that while winning a global award is a measure of success, it is not our only measure of success.

Want to Know More?

NYUAD students are invited to stop by the Career Development Center (CDC) and make an appointment to talk with our director of global awards; you do not have to know what it is you are looking for, as all of our staff members love helping students explore their various interests.

Online Resources

Here are a few excellent databases that you can review in order to look for some global awards that might be a good fit for you, your interests, your skills, and what you are looking to do next: