guest118 wrote:Has anyone else run into timing problems (deadlines) with outside scholarship acceptance or university scholarship timeline? How did you handle it? Also, at what point do you accept what you have and move on?...bird in the hand!
If you have a guaranteed outside offer, take it. You can always apply for SMART next year and you can always try for government internships and/or post-graduation employment. If your university had a deadline of wanting to know about scholarships yesterday (for example), I promise you that they won't turn down that money if it ends up coming later on. For fall semester, most universities have a deadline of sometime partway into the semester for tuition funds to be paid.
As far as the funding issue goes, there are many hands at play here. First, just because an amount of money has been budgeted for an agency/directorate, does not mean that's how much they actually get. Then, once they have that money, it's up to that agency to decide how to spend it. If an unexpected expense comes up, well, that money has to come from somewhere and spending elsewhere gets cut. And you have to remember, the potential budget issue we and SMART are facing is not just about the NDEP funding. Although NDEP/SMART may be receiving a similar amount of money, the individual facilities may not be. This may be a major factor when deciding how many scholarships to award because between budget cuts and hiring freezes, there are likely to be fewer facilities able to take on a SMART scholar and guarantee employment post-graduation. Clearly, the previous cohorts have already experienced problems with this and we have already seen that several SFs have been removed from the list published by SMART.