I was selected as an Opportunity Funds scholar by EducationUSA Nigeria, in the cohort advised out of the Abuja center. The program underwrites the up-front costs of applying to graduate study in the United States for candidates who are academically competitive but unable to meet those costs privately, and it was on that support that I assembled and submitted my doctoral applications.
The applications returned four fully funded doctoral offers, of which I accepted Florida State University’s, entering the PhD program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. At the point of selection I had graduated from the Federal University of Petroleum Resources, Effurun (FUPRE), with a cumulative grade point average of 4.95 on a 5.00 scale (the highest recorded at the university since its establishment, and first in class), along with a gold medal from the national undergraduate mathematics competition and two technical publications. EducationUSA Nigeria profiled the outcome publicly in April 2021.
About the program
Opportunity Funds is a program of the United States Department of State, delivered through the EducationUSA network of advising centers that the Department maintains in countries around the world. It addresses a narrow but decisive obstacle in international graduate admissions: the expenses that fall due before any funding decision is made. Standardized testing, application fees, credential evaluation, visa processing, and airfare must all be paid in advance, and for otherwise strong candidates these costs are frequently prohibitive. As a result, the applicant pool is filtered by ability to pay well before it is filtered by academic merit.
The program covers those preparatory costs for a small number of candidates judged likely to win full financial support from United States institutions on the strength of their record. Selection is therefore concentrated on applicants whose academic standing is already competitive and for whom the financial barrier is the binding constraint. Because the intended outcome is admission with full funding, the program is best understood as removing a structural barrier to access, not as a scholarship toward tuition.
Candidates are identified and advised through the EducationUSA centers in their own country, which also provide guidance on institution selection, application strategy, and the admissions process itself.
References
- EducationUSA Nigeria, Facebook, 16 April 2021.
- EducationUSA Nigeria, Instagram.