OBU Scholarship Applications Opening Soon!

The Shore Old Boys’ Union will shortly be offering all students in Year 12 the opportunity to apply for the OBU Scholarship. The Old Boys’ Union Scholarship is awarded by the Old Boys’ Union to a boy (or boys) completing their final year at School.

The scholarship is provided to the successful recipient/s after they leave Shore to provide financial support in the pursuit of an activity (or activities) that seek to serve the wider community. Shore has always sought to ‘Build Good Men’. One of the characteristics of good men is that they seek to serve others, including family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and wider society.

The purpose of providing the financial support is so that the Old Boy can pursue some form of service activity that they might not normally have the resources to pursue. The scholarship seeks to acknowledge both a boy’s appreciation of the School’s aims and his desire to put into practice, in a unique way, what he has learned. The value of the scholarship is a minimum of $3,000. It may be utilised by the recipient/s over a three-year period up to 31 December of the third year following the final year of School. The Scholarship recipient/s are announced in the final week of Term 3.

Some examples of service-related activities might include volunteering for a charity, serving with Indigenous communities, participating in an Aid programme, assisting rural communities in times of need, volunteering with the SES, volunteering with a local community group, or volunteer coaching at a local club or sporting club.

I was awarded the OBU scholarship in 2015, and it has helped me deliver healthcare to people living in remote and rural Australia. I used my OBU scholarship to help me fund two trips to South-East Asia. The first of these trips was to volunteer at a rural school in Laos, and the second was to work in a military hospital in Cambodia. These trips demonstrated to me how I can apply my training as a physiotherapist to people in an extremely remote setting. 

For the past three years, I have been working as a physiotherapist throughout the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Being awarded the OBU Scholarship has helped me work in my dream job and make a difference to some disadvantaged people living in very remote communities around Australia. I challenge every student in Year 12 to apply for the Scholarship and see what they can achieve with this award. 

Mr Tom Robertson (’15)
OBU Scholarship Recipient