Uniplaces, an online student accommodation booking service, has announced a scholarship that will support international students and raise awareness of how housing costs can be a barrier to studying overseas.
The ‘Living the Dream’ project is being piloted this month and will fund living costs for five university students anywhere in the world for a semester.
“Ultimately, we see accommodation as a big barrier for education worldwide at the moment,” Uniplaces co-founder, Ben Grech, told The PIE News.
“And we see that the scholarships are a great way to reinforce that message. It’s a great way to build awareness around the issues of accommodation but also actually helps some students who perhaps wouldn’t have had an international experience or even would not have been able to go to university, to do so.”
In order to be in with a chance of winning, students must submit videos of “random acts of kindness” to the website.
“Ultimately, we see accommodation as a big barrier for education worldwide at the moment”
The five entries with the most votes and which fit the brief set by Uniplaces, will have their accommodation funded for the duration of a semester wherever in the world they will be studying. The UK-based company has promised that one of the five beneficiaries will be in the UK.
Random acts of kindness submitted so far have ranged from topping up a fellow student’s travelcard to setting up a furniture swap-shop on campus.
While Uniplaces has put forth some of the funding for the scholarship, the rest has come through crowd-funding.
“We’ve received donations from parents, other students and interested people who like the campaign and want to kind of be involved,” said Grech.
“We’ll be looking to partner with people in the future to actually try to grow the fund and deliver more of these scholarships to more students around the world.”
The deadline for submissions is at the end of April, and so far almost 3,500 applicants have been made by students in North America, South America, Australia, Europe and the UK.
