J’can heads to Denmark on Erasmus Mundus Scholarship
YOHAN LEE, a recent graduate of the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) at The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, has been selected for the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship. He is one of 15 students who were selected from an applicant pool of nearly 500 students across the globe.
The 27-year-old will pursue a master in journalism, media, and globalisation, a programme that has been offered since 2005 under the European Union’s scholarship scheme.
Come September, Yohan begins the two-year degree programme taught collaboratively at Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Hamburg in Germany.
Erasmus Mundus is a cooperation and mobility programme in the field of higher education that aims to enhance the quality of European higher education and promote dialogue and understanding between people and cultures through cooperation with Third-World countries.
APPLIED BEFORE
Lee had applied for Erasmus Mundus Scholarship earlier and was not successful.
“In my last semester at CARIMAC, I applied for the scholarship with high hopes that I would get through. But it wasn’t to be then. I was admitted to do the master’s but did not receive the scholarship,” he said.
Programme administrators encouraged him to make every effort to accept the self-funded
option, but it was not feasible due to the lack of adequate financial resources.
“It was enticing, but I knew I couldn’t afford to pay for higher education on my own, especially outside of Jamaica. My mother did her best to help me fund undergraduate studies here, but I eventually had to seek further assistance and relief for her.
“To do that, I had to work really hard and find opportunities. Merit-based scholarships, namely the Arnold Foote Foundation and the Daphne Plummer scholarships, as well assistance from my mother’s employer, Chungs Catering Services, covered everything. Naturally, I figured that formula would work for me again,” Lee continued.
He has been successful in the second attempt at the scholarship and is looking forward to the unfolding of a new chapter of his life.
“We are very happy and excited for Yohan,” Melody Cammock-Gayle, Maverick
Communications’ CEO, a company where Lee works as a Communication Officer, said. “He has a very bright future ahead of him, and we wish him all the very best.”