The Office of National & International Fellowships (ONIF) encourages the LMU community to recommend students for fellowship support, and encourage them to map out a 4-year plan that includes fellowships. Advise them to start early! Please complete our referral form and ONIF will reach out to the student to introduce them to our services, including fellowship opportunities that meet their academic and professional goals.
Ideal Candidates
Selection committees aren’t impressed with mere busyness and high GPAs; what they want most to see is passion and commitment from students who consistently challenge themselves. The strongest fellowship candidates are those who, regardless of their year in school, already possess a fairly well-defined sense of what they want to accomplish with their lives, either intellectually or professionally, and most likely have already begun to take the firsts steps necessary to reach those goals. In other words, the ideal fellowship candidate is not simply a joiner; they are instead a hard-working and creative leader, an agent of change who identifies a problem and then sets off finding its solution.
A student’s grades should be your least concern when it comes to recommending one of them to apply for fellowships. It is true that many of these awards require a grade point average ranging from A- to A, but by themselves grades function mainly as a qualifier, and even if a student can boast an unblemished academic record, they won’t get very far in these competitions unless they can demonstrate the kind of intellectual or professional passion and commitment described above. On the other hand, if they have fashioned a goal and are already working towards it, don’t hesitate to recommend them even if you’re worried that her academic record might not be impressive enough. The grade thresholds for fellowships are much more flexible than you may realize, and for the student who seems to you to possess the right stuff and no less than a 3.0 GPA, there will always be something at our office for which to apply and for which they’ll have a reasonable chance of winning.