By Phayul Reporter
Aspirants to the annual Fulbright scholarship programme faced a blow today as the High Level Scholarship Committee in a meeting of 9 March decided to disallow candidates with masters degree from the preliminary selection round.
According to an announcement issued on 24 November 2003 by the HLSC, an applicant who had already acquired masters degree are not eligible to apply for masters degree again but will be allowed to appear in the exams if his or her subject is a research oriented one. The Department of Education earlier in the announcement has given 25 educational courses for the applicants to opt for.
Several applicants with masters degree have been dismissed from the programme for the year 2005 leaving a handful of applicants in the actual run up to the most coveted scholarship programme of the exile community.
In a letter sent to the dismissed candidates who have submitted their masters degree certificates, the Department of Education has said that their subjects were not accepted by the HLSC as being research oriented and that they have been rendered ineligible for the programme.
“This is not fair. No one under the Tibetan Fulbright Scholarship programme so far has done any research, a candidate is bound by the educational system of the United States to first finish masters degree from a university there and make himself or herself eligible for any further study. Our masters degree will not be considered a post graduate degree course by the US universities”, says Dorjee Damdul (name changed on request)
He further said that the Tibetan administration should open up more opportunities for as many people as possible and not the other way round. ” The applicants without masters degree are as good as those who have masters degree, you can literally clear masters degree exam by studying for a week. Why not make them compete and let the best win. Why are we limiting the competition and giving the mediocre an edge” says another young Tibetan aspiring for the programme.
“Those who do well in the bachelors’ degree succeed in continuing their scholarships for masters, be it from DOE or TCV or Mussoorie homes school. And those who do not study fail to continue their study after bachelors and they join work and now they are on the winning side. Is this how we reward who worked hard”, says a student doing his masters from Delhi University.
“We are put in a very strange situation now. If we want to apply for Fulbright we need two years’ service, if we go to look for job we are asked to wait for vacancy announcements. If we have masters degree we can not apply for masters degree under Fulbright programme. We are pulled from all sides”, he continues.
