News | 03 October 2022
Call for Universities and Colleges: Connecting The Industry
The Scholarship Committee is seeking help from our members. As many of you know, the Scholarship Program awards scholarships to students pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree in an aviation oriented academic program. The scholarships are meaningful. The highest award is as much as $30,000. This past year, we awarded 41 scholarships to students from almost every continent for a total amount of almost $500,000. Awards are made on the basis of merit as perceived by the ten members of the Scholarship Committee who dedicate significant amounts of time to review over seventy applications each year. Each application is reviewed and scored by each member of the Committee. The scoring is done on numerical basis with 10 being the highest achievement. The scores are aggregated and awards made based on the scoring.
Judgements are made on academic proficiency, intensity of interest in aviation, financial need, and eagerness to become part of the ISTAT family. Awards are made without influence of nationality, race or gender. In fact, the award ratio by gender is exactly the same as the ratio by gender of the applications.
We work with a group of dedicated ISTAT members who serve as ambassadors to the schools in our network. The ambassadors may be alumni or have a nexus to the college or university. Through the ambassadors, we communicate details about the program process and application results. The Committee works with some of the finest schools in the world that offer an aviation program. However, we are not sure that we cover them all. For instance, one of our Committee members just learned that her alma mater is now offering a sophisticated aviation program that we were not aware of. Needless to say, we are welcoming them into our program. So this is where we are looking to our fellow ISTAT members for some assistance.
We are asking each of you to please alert us to universities and colleges from around the world that offer aviation oriented curricula. We ask that you consider your respective alma maters, schools that your children or relatives may attend and schools to which you may have some sort of nexus. If you identify a school that you believe we should engage, please contact me at ALaStella@AirCapital.com.
Thanks for your help!
Andrew La Stella
Scholarship Program Chair Principal
AirCapital Aviation Services LLC