In the world of scholarship hunting, resilience doesn’t always come with a loud voice or a victory parade. Sometimes, it’s the quiet tapping of a keyboard at 2 a.m. after your fiftieth rejection. Sometimes, it’s showing up again and again with a slightly better essay, a slightly stronger CV, and a heart still willing to believe in a “yes.”
Ask Favour Onoharigho, and she’ll tell you about late nights spent rewriting personal statements. About how, after one rejection too many, she started to see every application not as an end in itself but as a rehearsal, a way to refine her voice, her story, her sense of purpose. She had been an Erasmus Mundus scholar already. She had excelled academically. But the road to a fully funded PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham wasn’t paved with straight lines.
It was marked by reflection and strategy. Internships in laboratories. Hours reading scholarship blogs. Conversations with mentors. She didn’t just want a scholarship; she wanted to be ready for the opportunity when it came.
“Every application was an opportunity to grow,” she said. And grow, she did.
On the other side of the country and a little further down the road of rejections, Bashir Bilya was learning a different lesson in resilience.
For him, it wasn’t just the wait. It was the weight.
The weight of an $80 application fee when the Naira was falling faster than hope. The guilt of leaning on the same four referees across 60+ applications. The sting of getting a professor’s nod, only to forgo the dream because there was no waiver in sight. The ache of seeing patients suffer from breast cancer in rural clinics, knowing he wanted, no, needed to do something, but didn’t yet have the access.
He didn’t just build spreadsheets to track deadlines. He built armor around his hope. And when that armor cracked like after the 53rd rejection, he gave himself space. He paused. He cried. He turned away from scholarship groups, even ignored messages from mentors like Dr. Kelechukwu.
But even then, resilience whispered.
And he listened.
Not all at once. But slowly. Through LinkedIn posts from other scholars who’d faced the same rejections. Through voice notes from friends who reminded him of his “why.” Through the hands that reached out again to say, “You are not alone.”
“I only need one yes,” he reminds himself. And so, he applies again.
This is what resilience looks like.
Not polished. Not perfect. But persistent.
It looks like Favour, who turned reflection into action.
It looks like Bashir, who turned rejection into redirection.
It looks like waking up to apply again even when you’ve run out of tears.
And maybe that’s the lesson: Resilience isn’t a loud roar. It’s the whisper that stays with you when everything else has gone quiet. It’s what keeps people like Favour and Bashir going until one day, the whisper becomes a door, and that door finally opens.
FINAL WORDS
And here’s to you, dear scholar.
Maybe you’re still in the middle of your story refreshing your inbox, dreading another rejection, questioning if this whole pursuit is even worth it.
et this be your reminder: you are not alone. Favour once stood where you stand. Bashir still walks this path with you. They didn’t wait for perfect conditions. They built resilience in the rubble of closed doors. And so can you.
Keep showing up. Keep refining your story. Keep remembering your “why.”
Because somewhere ahead, a “yes” is waiting with your name on it.
Feeling stuck? Tired? Ready to quit?
Pause, breathe but don’t stop.
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