ASDVC approved their plans on Tuesday to offer four new scholarships to DVC students.

The new scholarships are in addition to the six existing scholarships for student leaders, according to ASDVC President Sam Park.

“Last year, we had six scholarships provided because we had $3,000 in scholarships we donated to the DVC foundation. This year we have $5,000 to do that, so $500 each, that’s 10 scholarships we can provide,” Park said. “We are thinking of keeping the six to leadership scholarships like we used to last semester, and create four new ones.”

The ASDVC Leadership Scholarship will be open for three continuing and three transferring students. In addition, they are setting four more kinds of scholarships for students in different situations; those who are parents, veterans and those who have excellent in studies and internationals.

“There are a lot of students that need our help as a student government,” Parliamentarian Maxwell Wilson said. “A lot of money sitting around that wasn’t being used, so we decided to use it for more student scholarships.”

One discussion about the required GPA for the scholarship had heated arguments from ASDVC members.

ASDVC senator Charles Ray Shisler expressed, “My opinion would be that it should remain low. I don’t have injection to raise the limit, but I feel that 3.0 is too high. I feel that leadership isn’t indicative of whether you’re a good scholar and neither does your GPA. There are plenty of very intelligent people who do excellent at school but more or less fail to do all the menial tasks associated with classes and therefore have bias brought upon them.”

On the other hand, Kevin Tian, the ASDVC vice-president of legislative affairs said, “It’s not another scholarship provided for a society. So the first step students really should do is to qualify themselves as student leaders, not just general leaders. I’m not saying that they should be an excellent leader in academic performance, but at least they should show their responsibility for their own studies.”

ASDVC encourages students to be aware of this chance to get scholarships, as well as making sure they are eligible.

“Don’t get intimidated by the process,” Park emphasized. “In the end, although the leadership scholarship sounds a little bit intimidating with the thousands of words you prompt, it’s set up so you can have students who are hardworking to be recognized for the work,” he said. “So we want students to at least engage and try to establish that help from that.”

Further information regarding the scholarship will be on the DVC website.

– Julian Mark contributed to this story.