🇳🇿 NZ University Scholarships Guide for High School Students

Note: This is a transcript for the above video

Hi friends, hope you’re doing well! This video is all about scholarships. I’ll be covering what the different types of scholarships are, how to find them, how to stand a good chance of getting them, and tips on writing your statement.

This video will be particularly helpful if you’re a high school student in New Zealand looking to find scholarships to fund your tertiary education.

Also, if you’re a junior in high school watching this video, first of all, well done! I have included a bonus section for you at the end of the video for how best to prepare for scholarship applications, because early preparation is really the key.

Types of Scholarships

There are three most common types of scholarships in New Zealand:

Scholarships offered by tertiary education providers like universities and polytechnics
Scholarships offered by foundations or trusts like the Rotary Club
New Zealand scholarships

This video will specifically focus on the first two types.

NZ scholarships are quite different. They are run by NZQA and the monetary reward varies depending on the level of scholarship you achieve. They are an actual examination that you sit for a particular subject, and the content is intended to be an extension of the usual Year 12 and 13 NCEA content. They are quite challenging, but if you’re interested, you should definitely have a chat about it with your teacher and they would be able to point you in the right direction.

How to Find Scholarships

There are many sites that you can use to find scholarships such as StudySpy and the websites of the tertiary providers.

Also, do ask your school careers advisors as they may know about scholarships that are not publicly advertised or commonly known.

How to Obtain Scholarships

So how do you actually get a scholarship?

First of all, you need to make sure you meet the requirements eg your residency status or if it has any grade requirements.

Now, every scholarship is different, but generally for most scholarships in New Zealand, here are the main things that are considered:

Grades
Leadership capabilities
Sporting or cultural involvements
Contribution to the community

1. Grades

While most scholarships prefer that you have Excellences (for NCEA) or As and above (for Cambridge), there are also some that have a greater emphasis on other areas such as maybe outstanding sporting or cultural accomplishments. Also, they look at your Year 12/ NCEA Level 2 results for scholarships, not Year 13/ Level 3.

2. Leadership capabilities

This includes things like a prefect, head of a club, or sports club captain. Basically anything where you showed you had extra responsibility in a team setting.

3. Sporting or cultural involvements

This is for if you’ve joined any sports clubs or been part of any performing arts groups like music or theatre.

4. Contribution to the community

Volunteering is a big part here. You can demonstrate this by helping out at places like retirement homes, selling poppies to raise funds for ANZAC day, or even during peer tutoring at school.

One thing to note is that you don’t just have to think of these things in a school context. For example, for Leadership capability, if you’re a teacher or team leader in a community organisation like a church, you can mention that too. In fact it’s better to have more variety.

So in summary, in order to stand a good chance of receiving a scholarship, it’s not all about grades. They want to see that you are a well-rounded person overall.

It will also help if you have good references. Try to find a teacher that you have a good relationship with and make sure you give them enough time to write it.

How to Write Your Statement

Now here’s the part which will probably take the most time. Some scholarships require it, and some don’t.

Basically, you will be given a broad question, and then you have to write a mini essay on it.

For example, I applied for UC’s Engineering High Achiever scholarship, and their question was “Describe your commitment to, or interest in, the BE(Hons) degree programme (500 words maximum)”.

Here are a few tips to craft a good statement:

1. Clarify and Identify Themes

Make sure you understand exactly what the question is asking for and identify key themes. For example, in the above case, it would be commitment, interest, and Engineering (specifically UC’s engineering program).

2. Brainstorm

Literally brain dump everything you can think of that might be relevant to the question. Eg:

Childhood fascination with how things work
How I participated in the Physics Tournament
How I’m committed to decreasing the gender barrier in engineering

3. Repeat key themes

When you start crafting your statement, make sure you use the same words that they mentioned in the question eg commitment and interest.

4. Have a good introduction and conclusion

Make sure that the intro draws the reader in and the conclusion makes an impression. One good way of doing this is to somehow mention how going to the university will benefit you and how you can give back to it too.

5. Tone

I got 6 scholarships across the University of Auckland, Canterbury, and Otago, and from experience, you don’t need an overly formal tone such as unnecessarily using big words. It’s nice to be personable and use language devices like anecdotes.

Bonus Section: Advice for junior high schoolers

As I mentioned in my intro, good on you if you’re a junior in high school watching this! It’s best to start these things early. For example, you do need good grades for most scholarships, and you do need to be involved in extra-curriculars, so if you start early, it will all start building up. If you build good study habits and consistently do well, it’s much easier for you to eventually get good grades in Year 12 if you keep it up.

Tip #1 and #2 are quite obvious, and they are to basically build a good record of grades and extra-curricular involvements early on.
Tip #3 is to make a list of all the things you do eg leadership positions, clubs joined, competitions won, awards received etc, because you’ll have to list these in your applications and it makes it a lot easier if you have a list of all these things.
Tip #4 is to be on the lookout. Make sure you are aware of what scholarships there are and know when they open and close. A handy thing to do would be to put all the dates in your calendar at the start of the year you intend to apply for scholarships.
Tip #5 is to start preparing for NZ scholarship exams early, if you intend on doing them. You don’t have to be in Year 13 to do them, you can even do them when you’re in Year 12. It definitely pays to go along to all those scholarship tutorials and just listen in.