Helping to make
higher education affordable

``We support students who would not otherwise realise their dream without financial assistance,'' says GE's president and national executive Pornlert Lattanan. ``So, the students don't need to be first in their class but must display a potential to succeed and show us that they want to help change society for the better.''

This rather unique search criteria explains why the GE scholarship covers three years of university education, starting from the Sophomore year. At the second year, Pornlert says, the students have matured to a point where they can see their future goals more clearly and, more importantly, have a higher chance of realising their potentials.

Penvipha Satsanarukkit

``Some who failed to shine in high school may stand out from the crowd at the university because they now are studying in the field that they like,'' he adds. Penvipha Satsanarukkit is one such student who fits perfectly the GE foundation's philosophy. Since her father passed away when she was in Prathom 4, she was left to support herself through school.

``At that point, I knew that the only thing that would change my life was education,'' she says. ``So, I always put the best effort into studying and have always maintained a GPA of 3.8 to 3.9,'' she adds. Thanks to her strong determination to succeed, Penvipha has always received financial assistance and scholarships since her father's death. This quality also caught GE Foundation's attention, which awarded the scholarship to her from 1998 to 2001.

``To me, this scholarship gave me an inspiration to excel in my studies. Without it, I probably wouldn't have graduated with honours,'' Penvipha says. After graduating from Kasetsart University's Faculty of Engineering, she went on to study, under a different scholarship, at the master's level at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi.

Next Fall, Penvipha hopes to start the next chapter in her pursuit of academic excellence overseas, where she intends to study specifically on nanotechnology. ``I want to stand in the front line as one of the world's leading academic researchers,'' she says. ``I have created a vision with three other friends of setting up a leading centre for the studies of [bio micro-electro mechanical systems] or nano devices in Southeast Asia,'' she adds.

Tossapol Tummala

Similar to Penvipha, Tossapol Tummala had always had a financial difficulty since primary school, when his parents decided to split up. Although deprived of money, Tossapol's academic performance was always the top in his class. Unlike Penvipha, Tossapol took up vocational studies at the end of Mathayom 3, before continuing on to a higher vocational diploma. When he entered King Mongkut's Institute of Technology North Bangkok (KITNB), Tossapol's chance of being qualified for most scholarships was slim.

``My situation was a bit different,'' Tossapol says. ``With the higher vocational diploma, I only had to study three more years at the university level to obtain a bachelor's degree in engineering,'' he adds. Because of this reason, Tossapol could not apply to many scholarship programmes that were available at the time. The GE scholarship, however, offers Tossapol an opportunity to free himself from the Student Loan Fund scheme, which he would have to repay afterwards.

``In my application essay, I told GE foundation about myself and why I needed the scholarship money,'' he says. ``The key to this, I think, is to be true to yourself, so that when the GE committee interviews you later on, what you say matches the thing you wrote down in the essay about yourself.''

With the GE scholarship, Tossapol graduated from KITNB with a bachelor's degree in computer engineering in 2001. He now works as a business application consultant with a local IT company. ``My ultimate goal is to become a university lecturer like my father. I would like everyone to know what I know and perform the best in class like I once did, so that they can pass the knowledge on to generations after generations,'' he says. ``My family always taught me that my duty as a student was to concentrate on studying and leave the financial or family problem with them. That's how I had always maintained good grades,'' he adds.

Since 1997, the GE Foundation has awarded up to 30 million baht worth of scholarships to 67 Thai students with a full three-year tuition, textbooks allowance, and personal expenses of 4,000 baht per month. The scholarship is available to students currently studying in one of 10 academic institutions and in one of the following programmes: accounting, chemistry, physics, computer science, environmental science, economics, and engineering.

In 2004, the foundation collaborated with the Institute for the Promotion of Teaching Science and Technology (IPST) and extended the scholarship programme to cover graduate students in teaching. ``These academic fields, we think, are what the country needs to build a strong foundation for its economic system and are the fields to which GE thinks developing countries should pay particular attention,'' Pornlert explains.