As many of us in STARFLEET are already aware, STARFLEET has a number of scholarships which we make available for our members.  Each scholarship is for a different area of study, and each helps out students who apply for them and who are selected by helping to reduce costs for a student by $500.

Our team thinks that $500 is a very small amount of money in education, these days.  In many cases, it will cover only a few of the books that a student needs for their education.

When we take a look at the list of scholarships, we see that there are 10 different scholarships available in STARFLEET, some of which haven't even seen applicants in some time.

So, when we consider these two things, our team would like to see if we can't do something to increase the amount of money that we give out when STARFLEET awards a scholarship by reorganizing and possibly combining some of the scholarships together in order to pool our scholarship dollars together a bit better.

We'd love to hear your thoughts about this, but our team is of two mindsets about how to accomplish this.

The first thought that we've had is that we combine two or more scholarships together in order to make a single scholarship.

For example, we have the DeForest Kelley/Dr. Leonard McCoy Medical Scholarship and the Marina Sirtis Veterinary Science Scholarship.  Both scholarships deal with medicine, one specific to human medicine, another to animal medicine.  They're both medical sciences, just of different species, so there may be an opportunity here to combine the two into a single Medical Scholarship.

Another example might be combining the LeVar Burton Educational Scholarship and the Gene Roddenberry Memorial Scholarship for Aspiring Writers into a single scholarship, and increasing the amount of a single scholarship from $500 to $1,000.  (This is a hypothetical number, we haven't yet committed to a specific dollar amount, but are looking at the ideas first and foremost.)

Now, not all scholarships can be easily paired together like the examples that I've given, so a second though that we've had about that is to reorganize them down into some basic categories, such as:

I don't know about down in the United States, but one thing that I hear about frequently is that we are starting to see a shortage in Canada of skilled labour, so having an option available for those who are going to a trade school may encourage our student members who are looking to go to a trade school to apply for one of our scholarships.

Then again, I think it would be great to see the look on the face of students at Wyotech when they see a Trekkie join them on one of their campuses for classes.

Share your thoughts with us, tell us what you think about reorganizing STARFLEET's scholarships and finding a way of better funding a student's education while they share their love of Star Trek with us.

A number of suggestions have come to us on this topic, they include: