Merit

Created in November 1992, the Georgia Lottery was conceived by the people of Georgia for entertainment and to increase the subsidies for education. There was a Lottery for Education Act that commissioned the Georgia Lottery Corporation (GLC) to supervise and run the lottery. On June 1993, the GA Lottery was launched and during the first-week, the tickets sales reached more than 52 million, which established a new opening-week lottery sales record of $7.80 per resident. Rebecca Paul was names the first president of the GLC. “The Lottery’s first-year per capita sales of $164.81 set a new national record, surpassing the previous mark of $128 set by Florida in 1988”, making the GA Lottery the biggest state lottery start-up ever.

Within five months, the Lottery achieved a first-year sales figure of $463 million, and ended its first full year with total sales of $1.1 billion. Consequently, its opening year made the Georgia Lottery give back to its community no less than $362 million, to the aid and support of education. In its second year, the Georgia Lottery managed $1.4 billion in total sales, returning more than $500 million education funds. For 7 successive years, the Georgia Lottery kept on surpassing all estimates with its breakthrough sales. Its operations kept up mounting until, during its thirteen’s year, the GA Lottery Corporation experienced again exceptional sales and proceeds to education. The next appointed President of the GA Lottery Corporation was Margaret DeFrancisco in 2003.

Until now, The Lottery has been allocating more than $9 billion of its revenue to the students of Georgia. By the means created by the Lottery, no less than 1 million students have the possibility to continue their college studies in Georgia, while more than 790,000 kindergarten children can commence their Pre-K program. Also, these funds have been used to equip classrooms with superior hardware and technological resources that is supposed to engage the students into the modern media and means of knowledge. The Georgia Lottery Corporation’s role is to generate income to support education projects; but the organism that allocates, manages and distributes this money is the Governor and the General Assembly.

The revenue that Georgia Lottery spawns are not meant, neither used to replace traditional funding in education, but to complement it. The State Auditor has released a report recently that reveals the overall augmentation of total funds to education since the Lottery’s foundation in a way that shows that the state subsidies on education have considerably grown since the Lottery has started.

The Mission of Georgia Lottery is seeking to stay consistent to its historical development. Its mission remains the same today, as it was when the lottery first started – to responsibly raise as much as possible for the educational programs. Georgia Lottery set a new record in profits during 2006, returning more than $822 million to learning programs. This is an increase of $20 million over last year and helps to ensure the future of the HOPE Scholarship and Pre-K Programs throughout the state.

Getting an international scholarship involves a lot of steps but just like everything else in life, it starts with a simple step. The first step in getting a scholarship is actually finding the right scholarship for you at the right University. This step is indeed a challenging task but not if you know the right secrets and not-so-known shortcuts!

So how do you find them? Let me count 3 ways.

Find Scholarships in Search Engines

Today, everything can be found using search engines. Knowing the right tips and tricks can help you find more relevant results for your scholarship search. For example, you want to find scholarships in your chosen field of study – Masters in Business Administration or MBA. Typing “MBA scholarships” will already give you a lot of relevant results but what if you want to see the latest MBA scholarships that are being offered, how would you do it?

(Note: This works only for Google). First, you type and enter the keyword “MBA scholarships” just like you normally do. Once you get to the results page, you now paste this string of words: &as_qdr=m at the end of the URL and press enter. Doing this will give you only the web pages on MBA scholarships that have been published in the last month. You can choose to filter results in the last 24 hours (&as_qdr=d), the last week (&as_qdr=w), or the past year (&as_qdr=y1).

To get specific search results, you have to add relevant modifiers to your keywords when you make your query. In scholarship search, relevant modifiers include “deadline (insert month)”, “study in (insert location)”, and “for (insert nationality, country of origin)”. In our example, specific keywords could be “MBA scholarships for Indians deadline December 2009”, “MBA scholarships for Indians in Europe” or any combination of keywords and modifiers that would best define your search. The key here is to be specific. Put the keyword/s inside quotation marks (“”) only when you want exact search results for that keyword.

Aside from Google and Yahoo, you can search for scholarships in different platforms like Blog/Blog Networks (using Google Blog Search), Twitter (using Twitter search), and even Facebook (search for scholarship groups).

Find Scholarships in Scholarship List/Databases

A lot of free resources on international scholarships are in the world wide web. Many websites and blogs compile scholarships available for international students and provide this service for free. Most of these websites have built-in search engines or allows for categorized browsing of scholarships.

You can find these websites in reputable directories of websites and blogs (such as Dmoz Directory, Yahoo Directory, Alexa, etc). You can also chance upon these websites when you do your search in search engines. Be careful to choose only the websites that add value to your search. When you do find the good websites, you can greatly benefit by subscribing to their updates.

Find Scholarships in the Websites of Universities and Scholarship Providers

Finding international scholarships requires knowing WHO offers them. Visit the websites of governments, embassies, and major international donors to know about the scholarship programs they offer. Some of these agencies provide special scholarship databases that allows students to find international scholarships offered by scholarship providers (e.g. DAAD Scholarship Database) or scholarships available for study in a specific country (e.g. grantfinder.nl – study in Netherlands).

We also know that a number of Universities offer scholarships as part of their international programs. Moreover, donor organizations and institutions often administer their scholarship programs through Universities. Not all Universities have programs for international students and not all administer scholarships in behalf of donor agencies, so obviously you have to find Universities that do. You can start by shortlisting the Universities where you plan to study and manually visiting the Universities’ websites and finding out if your University of choice offer scholarships for international students.