Top 5 Best Medical Scholarships That Cover Tuition and Living Costs

In today’s guide, we will look at five absolute best medical scholarships you have to apply to. We all know how expensive medical school can be in the United States and most people graduating with an average debt of $150,000 to $200,000. It’s a lot of money and scholarships can go a long way in reducing your financial burden and giving you the peace of mind to pursue your education as you’re supposed to.

We are going to be looking at the amounts that the scholarship offers, the type of scholarship it is and the eligibility.

PDSOR Scholarship

The scholarship awards up to $90,000 for two years for a graduate education. The type of scholarship is a merit based scholarship and you do not have to prove over again that you are poor and you need money. And it really truly awards you money based on your accomplishments and the dreams that you have. So the PDSOR scholarship is a merit based scholarship

Eligibility is that you have to be an immigrant or from an immigrant background, which means that one of your parents or both parents immigrated into the country. Another part of it that’s really crucial is that you have to be at the time of application be 30 years or younger when you apply.

PDSOR scholarship is actually open to international students as long as you did high school. So if you are an international student looking for ways to fund your education in the United States and you went to high school, the PDSOR scholarship is highly recommended.

Dolores Zorab Scholarship

The Dolores Zorab scholarship awards a full tuition and an $18,000 stipend for three years. This scholarship is a need based scholarship, which means that like, you know, you come from a background that unfortunately you cannot finance your education by yourself or your parents can also not help you. This scholarship is need based and it’s okay. You don’t have to be shy about being broke. You’re broke now, but you will not be broke forever. We’re just like broke for a little bit because we’re in med school and we’re not working.

The eligibility for the Dolores Zorab scholarship is that you have to be in graduate school and really truly you can be studying anything. This was started initially for Armenian studies, but however, now it’s been expanded to any field of graduate studies and professional school. So medicine, law school, whichever one it is, you can apply as long as you’re an American citizen and you come from a financially challenging background.

Samvid Scholarship

This is a scholarship that’s not very popular because they’ve not been out for a long time. However, they do give out a significant amount of money and you need to apply. The amount of money they give is $50,000 for up to two years. It is a merit-based scholarship.

For eligibility, you have to be a US citizen who is a full-time graduate student, have an undergraduate GPA of at least 3.5 and be a driver of change.

Military Health Profession Scholarship Program

This is a scholarship that is geared towards recruiting medical students and hopefully physicians into the military. Because guess what? The military also needs their own physicians. For the amounts, truly everything is paid for. Your tuition is paid for. You’re given a living stipend to pay for your rent, your food, your utilities, basically your cost of living, as well as reimbursement for books, equipment, and supplies.

To be eligible, you have to be a US citizen. You have to gain admission to medical school. You need a 3.2 undergraduate GPA and a 500 MCAT, as well as a bachelor’s from the United States. The only caveat about this scholarship is that it’s not truly free. So for every year that the military funds you, you have to give that year back in service.

So if, say, the military funds you for four years, you have to give a minimum of four years back to the military once you’re done with medical school. And there are different ways of doing this. Some people do their residency in the military. However, if you do a civilian residency, that doesn’t count and you still have to serve four years in the military.

The Small Scholarships

So these are not like the big ones where your tuition is funded, you’re given a stipend, like in one scholarship or like one program, like the ones we mentioned earlier, like PD Soros or the Dolores Zora or the Samvid. These are like smaller scholarships that like add up if you apply to a lot of different ones. As the saying goes, little drops of water makes a mighty ocean.

It can be like so exhausting applying for these things constantly. But they are worth it. If you take it as your little part time job and you’re applying to this smaller scholarships, they could like really add up.

NMF Website

This website is a bank of scholarships and they changed the application process such that you can have one application that goes to multiple scholarships. In the past you had to like apply individually to every scholarship and that was like very exhausting.

However, with this like new application system, one application, it goes to multiple scholarships and they have like different application cycles. So definitely check the NMF out.

Specialty Scholarships

So these are scholarships that are geared towards students that are interested in a particular scholarship. One common one that is out there is the Dr. Rich and Alan scholarship. This is a scholarship geared towards cardiology. So if you’re like a medical student, incoming medical student who has some experience in cardiology, some interest in cardiology, it is highly recommended you apply.

AATS Diversity Scholarship

AATS diversity scholarship give you up to $16,000 for two years. And it’s a really great scholarship for those who come from a financial challenging or like need based background and need money to pursue their medical education. So that’s also another scholarship that is highly recommended if you’re interested in cardiac surgery or even like potentially interested.

FAQs

Conclusion

Once you show interest is enough to apply for these scholarships, it’s not a binding agreement that once you get the scholarship, you have to be a cardiologist or a cardiac surgeon. A couple of people that got some of these scholarships and like they ended up in like different specialties completely, not cardiac surgery. So absolutely apply if you have an interest and if you have someone in the field that can write you a letter of recommendation.

The loan burden coming out of medical school is insane. So even if you’re able to reduce it somehow, even if you get like $10,000 for four years, that’s $40,000 worth of free money. And that’s a lot of money.