Scholarships And Fellowships

Author: Joju Paul

Introduction - No service is as deserving As providing Scholarships to the deserving .

Lack of financial resources need not prevent a student from achieving academic goals. Apart from bank loans, a whole range of scholarships is available at different levels. Our new series takes a bird's eye view of the scholarship terrain.

Overview

Higher education is expensive the world over. You aspire for your dream career. But the realisation of that dream requires financial support. Very often your family cannot afford the heavy bills. The alternative is to look for monetary assistance from elsewhere.

Sources

There are basically two kinds of sources. One is scholarship or fellowship that involves a gift you do not have to repay. Fellowships usually focus on research work. The second one is loan, which you will have to repay in accordance with liberal conditions with regard to interest rate and stretched time for repayment.

Scholarships may be provided by the government or philanthropic individuals or institutions which have altruistic motives. In either case, the award of scholarships would entail conditions ranging from brilliance to nativity, and discipline to financial capacity. Certain scholarships may be for education in India, whereas others may be for overseas studies. Some others may be for either.

Basic objective

Every scholarship or fellowship has the basic objective of promoting excellence in advanced study or research by a competent individual committed to pursuit of excellence. No aid-giver would choose to offer incentives to indifferent people. Higher education, specialised training, or dedicated research should result in enhancement of professional competence in the scholar as well as benefit in some form to society.

The award of a scholarship or fellowship indicates the honourable recognition of the recipients; this puts a heavy responsibility on their shoulders to live up to the expectations.

An award of this kind not only fires the scholars with enthusiasm, but drives them to professional attainments, consequent sense of fulfilment, and a spirit of motivating the coming generation by setting quality goals. On a wider scale, we have international exchange programmes that result in cross-fertilization of ideas in a seamless world.

There are vast segments in society with members endowed with natural gifts, brilliance, and an inclination for sustained effort for attaining excellence, but are kept back by poverty. The institution of scholarships and fellowships is a boon to such deprived youngsters.

There is a general lack of awareness regarding the availability of different kinds of scholarships. This series aims at furnishing an outline of some of them. Details to suit individual interests will have to be gathered, since this treatise cannot be exhaustive.

Further, there may be frequent changes in the style and conditions for the award of scholarships. Often some of these may be terminated. So before launching an effort to procure a scholarship or fellowship, you have to ascertain the precise position.

There are a number of bank and other financial institutions that offer educational loans on liberal terms. Most of our nationalised banks have schemes for higher studies in India and abroad.

It may be appreciated that in most cases we may have to spend some money initially for miscellaneous procedural formalities in order to secure the assistance. We should not be under the impression that we can straightaway join courses in higher education without spending anything from our pocket.

Architecture, the Timeless Gem

Author: Ashley Daniels

Unlike many other practical professions, architecture is an ancient discipline responsible for the design of structures and buildings whose roots can be traced back to thousands of years B.C.

Unlike many other practical professions, architecture is an ancient discipline responsible for the design of structures and buildings whose roots can be traced back to thousands of years B.C.

Architectural history can take you through the evolution of those structures that served as a landmark to remote civilizations, such as the Phoenicians and the legendary Tower of Babel, or the Egyptians and their incredible mortuary architecture, reflected in pyramids, tombs, and many other ancient buildings along the Nile River.

In fact, the first big architectural design recorded in history was the work of Imhotep, Egyptian vizier, doctor, high priest, and scribe to King Djoser. Imhotep designed and built the complex that took the name of his king, between the years 2630 to 2611 BC.

Vestiges of the most varied architecture speak for themselves about the most varied civilizations, traditions, and beliefs around the world. Without architecture, the history of mankind would be incomplete.

Many surviving buildings of the ancient world are examples of the great things that architecture can do for the world. Among them, we can name the Great Pyramid of Giza, listed as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the Great Wall of China, built between the years 221 to 206 BC.

Time evolved and all buildings and design began to take special characteristics, becoming symbols of different eras identified as architectural styles. In ancient Greece, where buildings seemed to always be the same, there were three types of columns to identified each period of time: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian.

The Romans inherited from the Greeks most of their traditions, beliefs, and customs, including architecture, but they also developed their own: as an example the Via Appia in Rome, and other surviving structures running from Italy to Great Britain.

Architectural history was influenced by artistic, economic, politic, and socio-cultural events throughout the centuries, and Europe became the cradle of many renowned architects in the years following the fall of the Roman Empire.

From Baroque to Art Nouveau, passing through Gothic, Romanesque, Renaissance, Churrigueresque, and many other architectural styles, we can enjoy today an eclectic blending of buildings, homes, and other structures that present to us their past.

Curiously, other human disciplines have been also associated with architecture, such as metaphysics, by the hand of fraternal organizations such as the Freemasonry, established in London as a secret society in 1717.

Naming themselves the Order of the Free and Accepted Masons, this fraternity encompasses nowadays a large number of international lodges under the symbol of a square and compasses with a letter "G" associated with the building of the Temple of King Solomon.

As time passes, the actual architecture differs in shape, materials, construction methods, and designing goals, but the work of the architects will endure for generations to come.

The Real State of the Economy – Good or bad?

Author: Stephen Morgan

There is something about the US Economy at the moment that I for one don’t get. Now it may be that being a brit, I am a little slow on the uptake; this has been known to happen every now and then but at the moment I cannot fathom several things out.

Firstly, the UK economy, despite the Chancellors proud claims, is not in exactly the best of shapes but in the US, the Government is technically, if not practically bankrupt. By this I mean fiscally and this is not meant as some value moral judgement on the standing of George W and the rest of the White House.

It is a fact that the US Government has an overall National Debt of in excess of $8 trillion dollars.

Secondly, the United States has become a country where almost anyone despite their financial background or credit record can get a line of credit.

Now in sound economic times this is fine and without these sorts of arrangements whole economies would disappear over night but it seems to be getting slightly silly at the moment with bankruptcies and bankrupts getting younger and younger as the months go by.

It used to be that credit was reserved for the privileged few and though I wouldn’t want to go back to the days of the late 19th or early 20TH Centuries it would appear that more and more Americans (and us Brits too it would appear) are relying more and more on “the old plastic” sitting in our wallets!

No longer do we save what we earn and again not to countenance a return to the days of prudence and thrift whereby nothing was bought until you could go in with the cash, this “live for today and hope for a better tomorrow” ethic could be bringing more problems than we reckon.

One of my worries about the economy is the absence of real, meaningful and independently verifiable statistics. If we trace back through the history of the Federal Reserve, we can see that it has continually devalued the currency by expanding the money supply. This practice is still in use but the problem we have at the moment is that since they stopped reporting the M3 Money supply numbers, no one knows exactly how and what they are doing.

If you check carefully and read between the lines of the financial press it would seem that most foreign nationals are looking for ways to withdraw from US Currency holdings into something more stable.

As an aside of how volatile things are the moment, anyone who has any experience of dealing online in eCommerce would be well advised to check out how expensive their transactions are at the moment. For example, anyone outside of the US who has a web site that is getting any form of advertising revenue via Google’s Adsense Programme at present has suffered a real time drop of revenue of about 3% in the last month or so.

This is not down to anything that is going on at Google. Just over a month ago the exchange rate between the dollar and sterling was approximately 1.80 / 1.81 dollars to every UK pound. Last weekend most online transactions and exchanges were looking at a rate 1.865 dollars to the pound.

Great if you want to buy fixed price items that were calculated in dollars but a real downer if your ad revenue was fixed in dollars.

Lastly, and this is the point that I can’t reconcile. The US Government has an organisation called the Government Accountability Office, this organisation is warning of impending economic disaster. The Secretary to the Treasury, Hank Paulson has now increased the frequency of the President’s Working Group in Financial Markets to meetings of every six weeks; this outfit is known informally as the “Plunge Protection Team”.
Now the question I have is that would they be doing these this if things were that well?
Now before any readers accuse me of some form of “jingoistic US Bashing” on the part of a “lippy opinionated Brit” let me state right here and now that things are actually far from “rosy this side of the pond” either but that is the subject of part two of this series of commentaries.