Stuned Scholarship, the Failure, and the Lesson-learned
Stuned, a shorthand of Studeren in Nederland, is a full-funded scholarship for master’s degree, short course, and tailor made training programs sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Nuffic Neso Indonesia along with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Indonesia will arrange some procedures and administrative documents that applicants should submit completely and punctually. For master’s scholarship program, the selection procedures and due dates for submission would be announced in the late of December or in the beginning of January. My advice is to frequently check the Nuffic Neso’s Website to ensure that you won’t miss the deadline for submitting your applications.
Stuned Scholarship is generally intended to young professionals and fresh graduates who have good academic and organizational records. In some scholarships, the GPA doesn’t mean a thing, but I think, in Stuned, they also put GPA as one of the main considerations to choose whether or not we are credible candidates. Fortunately, young professionals might have more chances than those of fresh graduates. If I am not mistaken, there are only no more than 11 awardees who are literally fresh graduates in my term because it might be that the priority is still young professionals who have working experiences at least 2 years.
More importantly, your motivation letter would be the most prominent attribute to market yourself. On the prepared application form, you need to write down your motivation by answering 3 questions with no more than 600 words. My advice is to deeply understand your own intention on studying abroad and why you choose that major, to read again, and to ask your friends to screen and to give feedback on your motivational letter, and you need to be straightforward to your own motivation. I think that other people don’t have rights to change your determination on what you are going to be in the future, they just have rights to support and to give you commentaries intended to rebuff your motivation. In my experience, I couldn’t neglect that my closest friends, Erwin and Tita have already given me many inputs to my motivational letter without trying to change my objectives. Put it simpler, they encouraged me to think beyond the boundaries in a hope that I could elaborate many important things that I could highlight on the letter.
Some documents that you need to prepare are as follows:
Application form (can be downloaded on the Nuffic Neso’s Website);
Curriculum Vitae (can be downloaded on the Nuffic Neso’s Website);
Academic Transcript (Bachelor’s Degree);
Bachelor Diploma or Certificate (Ijazah S1);
IELTS Score (minimum score: 6.5 or CEFR Level B2);
Letter of Acceptance (LoA) from one of the universities in The Netherlands;
Other supporting documents, etc.
You may add other supporting documents such as a letter of recommendation from your Dean, bachelor’s thesis supervisor, or maybe your office director, a thesis proposal (your prior thesis design projecting what you are going to research on your master’s thesis), certificate of achievements, seminars, workshops, etc.
Furthermore, Stuned Scholarship has also priority areas to intentionally strengthen the bilateral relationship between the Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands so the prospective applicants should also give a further attention to attached documents on the Nuffic Neso’s website regarding some priority areas or study fields’ priorities that are required for Stuned Scholarship. In my term, there were six main areas highlighted by the Nuffic Neso which were including Health Management, Transport (Agro)logistic and Infrastructure, Security and Rule of Law, Water, Agri-food and Horticulture, and International Trade, Finance, and Economics. At that time, I have been admitted at MA in International Relations in the track of European Integration in which this major is still considered as a part of Security and Rule of Law area. These might be changed due to the condition of bilateral relations among both countries.
Please bear in mind that they might not circumscribe how many additional documents you can apply as supporting documents to your application, however, you should rethink and select which documents that might be aligned with your major, motivation, and objective to study in the Netherlands. To sum up, no need to attach unnecessary documents.
In addition, you might be surprised that the selection process is only all about the application you have sent to the office of the Nuffic Neso. It takes a month on waiting the announcement, but you don’t need to worry because they will keep you updated whether your application has been well-received or not. In my term, the selected awardees are announced via e-mail in the late of May. They won’t also give you a prior notification or a precise date when they will exactly announce the successful candidates. On the other hand, you couldn’t underestimate the selection process because it might be seen so simple and easy, but the fact is that you need to have been accepted in a particular university in the Netherlands first before you submit the application to Nuffic Neso Office in Jakarta and there could be many standards and screening process both at Nuffic Neso and the Embassy that we don’t exactly know.
The selection process at the universities is sometimes more complicated. In the case of the University of Groningen, they determine the prerequisite documents for students who are keen on applying at the Faculty of Arts. At that time, I needed to complete documents as follows:
IELTS Test Score (minimum score: 6.5 and each band score cannot be less than 6.5, too) ;
Bachelor’s thesis resume in English no longer than 10 pages;
Bachelor’s certificate; and
2 letter of recommendations (my advice is that would be great if you could get a letter from Professors or Deans at your previous university).
You need to submit it via Studielink, an academic platform for all applicants who want to apply at one of the universities in the Netherlands, and no need to pay anything including application fee.
Within 2 weeks, the Admission Office of your selected faculty will notify via e-mail whether you are unconditionally admitted, conditionally admitted, or unfortunately rejected. Sometimes, most students are recommended to do a Pre-master especially for students who are originally not coming from IR discipline.
In fact, the number of selected candidates for Stuned Scholarship has also decreased compared to those who were accepted last year. As our Scholarship coordinator has said, this would be more competitive year by year. The Dutch Government has believed Indonesian students to study there so there is no doubt that the Nuffic Neso and the Dutch Embassy would be very selective. I was also so nervous at that time, waiting so long under uncertainty.
Technically, at that time, the Nuffic Neso Indonesia instructed us to submit documents before 1 April 2016 and I received the result via e-mail on 25 May 2016 at 4.45 am in the morning. I submitted the documents on 29 March 2016 directly to the Nuffic Neso Office on Jamsostek Building 20th Floor, Jakarta. You can also send it via Pos Indonesia, JNE, or other courier services in Indonesia. Once I have been admitted as a grantee, the Nuffic Neso Indonesia would facilitate us on Acculturation Class in which we are encouraged to know the Dutch culture and language. For grantees who were living outside Jabodetabek, the Office would also arrange their accommodations. On the other hand, once we have accepted and have entered the academic period at particular universities in the Netherlands, the one who will be in charge of the scholarship is our university. The Nuffic Neso Indonesia will directly contact the university to arrange all financial procedures for our scholarship since this scholarship is from the Dutch government. This procedure is perfectly well-arranged and I am feeling really satisfied.
If the readers want to know more about Stuned Scholarship specifically, you may contact the Nuffic Neso Indonesia Office via this following e-mail: [email protected] or if you want to know personally in terms of my personal experience in dealing with Stuned applications, you may also write me an e-mail to: [email protected] or add me on Line application with username: meilindasy. You can ask me anything both technical procedures and personal experiences and I will happily reply it as soon as I receive your e-mail. I will also never think that your questions are unnecessary because I really know how it feels when we want to prepare for the best on our applications, we simply don’t want to miss a thing, right? Thus, ask me anything!
One motivational statement that I heard from my Scholarship coordinator at the very first meeting of Welcoming Session was that “We choose you because you deserve it.” The thing that I am really into Stuned is that because they think we deserve to be supported on realizing our motivation, they want to eagerly invest on us and they don’t want us to pretend that we have such a loan with them and need to pay back immediately. They really encourage us to seek for experiences as much as possible.
Then, one thing that I learned from the long process of seeking and struggling to finally get the most suitable scholarship is that “Stop thinking that you need the scholarship, but start thinking that the scholarship needs you.” How to show that the scholarship needs you? You also need to pinpoint the best version of yourself and struggle more to prepare yourself. There are so many other prestigious scholarships out there which might offer a larger amount of allowance, but the right thing is to choose the best one which aligns to your motivation and suits you the best. I have also proceeded an application for LPDP beforehand, but I have to admit that I failed to convince the assessors to give me the scholarship. When you are failed, admit it, don’t keep blaming on others. Once I received that bitter announcement, I also felt so disappointed after struggling for 5 months on preparing this battle. But then, I keep contemplating and doing self-reflection as well as immediately building myself to meticulously check again my application for Stuned because the deadline had been approaching. I also didn’t mean to make Stuned as my second scholarship option, but, in fact, my principle is that I don’t want to do multiple applications because, first, LPDP’s selection process is opened along the year and I took the very first term because if we want to actively involve at class on September 2016, we need to get the scholarship 6 months in prior. Second, based on my own principle, just in case, I got both accepted, I have to choose one and it means that I have thrown away an opportunity that is supposed to be ultimately valuable for others who are also seeking for scholarship but not accepted. From then on, I was asking myself what exactly my objective and future plan for master’s degree are. During my contemplation period, I was feeling no direction and merely got hired as a private teacher for IELTS and basic German. I also felt anxious because most of my friends have been settled down in such good institutions or companies, but me, only running from one place to other places to share my limited knowledge. But then, I found something that really makes me defining what happiness is, witnessing a person making a good progress because of the time we spent on studying and discussing together. Seeing a person making a progress on doing something is such an unprecedented feeling for me until I eventually realize what passion exactly means. Sometimes our passion has been overlapped with our ambition and it is unavoidably true that we often cannot distinguish the terms of passion and ambition themselves. This circumstance also taught me a lot to differentiate the profound meaning of both terms and I hope you, readers, will also find your own meaning or may be already on the right track.
After those long application scholarship processes, I barely know that every scholarship has its own character. Not only preparing your application and the battle of the selection process, but you also need to have an in-depth understanding in terms of your objectives and characters, and the scholarship’s objectives and characters. Unintentionally, both will create such a great configuration once you have been accepted. They choose you because you are suitable with their aims and vice versa. In the meantime, once you are failed, no need to think that you are not smart enough, but please thinking that there are many great things left behind which have been prepared for and suit you the best. “Success is not always about how great your achievement is, but sometimes success is about how you deal with your failure.”
Last but not least, another case is that sometimes we also have to deal with the condition of whether or not the scholarship is more important than the major or specification we are keen on. As its consequence, we often experience the shifting of academic and financial motivation in which we, unfortunately, need to change our most preferably major in a purpose to be more easily getting the scholarship. This circumstance might occur for applicants who want to apply for Stuned or other scholarships. Nevertheless, don’t let that condition happens to you. Because if I could say some words, choosing a master’s degree is not an option, but somehow, it must be a priority. You need to focus on your passion and what you really want to struggle for in the upcoming academic year once you have already been accepted. In fact, there are many things out there you need to deal with during your master’s life. The Honeymoon Phase would actually end immediately.
To close these elaborative procedural instructions regarding Stuned Scholarship and my personal experience as well as the lesson learned I have obtained, I just want to shout out: “Good luck and I am wishing you all the best for your scholarship application process! Allah will definitely guide you to the right decision and Allah will absolutely choose the right destiny for you as well. In between of your struggles, always reminds Allah, too.” <3
