BANGALORE: John Joe Vattathara has become the first student from Bangalore to win a scholarship for a four-year electrical and electronics engineering course at Israel’s Tel Aviv University (TAU).
The scholarship will cover Vattathara’s yearly tuition fee of $12,500 for all the four years. A student of Narayana PU College in Marathahalli, Vattathara is one of the seven Indian students who won the scholarship to study the course this year. “I came to know about TAU and the scholarship when they visited my college,” Vattathara said after receiving his student visa from Israeli Consul General Menahem Kanafi. His is the first student visa issued by the Consulate General of Israel in Bangalore.
The 18-year old is the son of Joe Jacob Vattathara and Tisha, residents of Hebbal. “On an average, an undergraduate programme in a foreign university costs anywhere around `25 lakh and we were in no position to afford that kind of money,” said Jacob.
At TAU, the BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering is one of three undergraduate courses offered in the medium of English, with civil engineering and liberal arts being the other two.
“India and Israeli institutions have collaborated on various fronts,” said Ehud Heyman, dean, The Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering at TAU.
He added that the Israeli government gives out 100 annual scholarships for postdoctoral students, under which each student is awarded $29,000.