Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) this week began the interview screening exercise for Eight Thousand, Eight Hundred and Sixty-Nine (8,869) Shortlisted candidates aspiring for the award of the Fund’s 2022/2023 Overseas Scholarship Schemes (OSS).
The exercise which is an annual programme organized by the Fund is being conducted across five designated centers in Nigeria. All the shortlisted candidates are to face experts from the academia and the oil and gas industry to defend their various research proposals, for the award of PTDF scholarships in the M.Sc. and Ph.D. categories.
Mr. Bello Mustapha, Manager, Education and Training, and Head, Overseas Scholarship Scheme (OSS) division of the Fund, confirmed that the interview was for candidates who met the set criteria to study in the fields of engineering and renewable energy, computing and geosciences, environmental and management, and other related disciplines relevant to Nigeria's oil and gas industry.
He said, due to security concerns, the Fund limited the process to five centers: Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Bauchi, and Kaduna. However, all candidates were given the option of choosing their preferred center to be interviewed from among the five specified centers.
Mr. Mustapha said that the Fund is screening a higher number of applications this year with over 8, 000 candidates progressing to the interview stage out of about 26,000 who applied for the scholarship. He went on to say that the process was designed to efficiently handle the large number of candidates while also meeting Federal Character requirements.
He went further to commend the Fund's painstaking effort to ensure a credible exercise by assembling subject matter experts, the majority of whom are PTDF Ex-scholars, to form a central selection committee that will select awardees for the 2022 round of scholarship awards with an expanded knowledge base and the capacity to deal with and accommodate a wider range of participants.
According to the breakdown of the candidates participating in the interview, 6258 were shortlisted for M.Sc. awards and 2,611 for Ph.D. awards. The screening committee will interview and evaluate the candidates using the Fund's scoring formula, which includes factors such as the quality of their research proposals and their relevance to the oil and gas industry, among others.