When I was in my final year of high school, my family couldn't afford to send me to university, so I looked for scholarships that would enable me to go.

Trawling through websites, I found:

• A $9000/ year scholarship to study civil engineering, which also included all university tuition and return flights home every year that would require you to do 12 weeks of work experience at the company every year, then work there for another 4 years afterwards.
• Scholarships of $6000/ year at a water facility with an internship and work contract afterwards.
• $2000/ year scholarships that would require you to join and be active in the organisation.  An exclusive scholarship - meaning you couldn't get any other.
• $8000/ year scholarships where you would have to work in a mine 10 weeks of every year.

I never got any of these, because I never applied.  They weren't aligned with the kind of engineering I wanted to do, the way I wanted to spend my university life, and what I wanted to do after university.

One scholarship that I did receive was for full tuition to finish my undergraduate degree and my masters in an accelerated programme of electrical engineering in 4 years.

That seemed like a lot of work and studying to me.

I decided that wasn't how I wanted to spend my university years.  I wanted to do more than just study and learn more than what I could from books.  So I turned that down too.

And I went to Melbourne University to study Mechatronics Engineering and Computer Science, with no scholarship and not enough money to live for a year.

In my first month, I found the Paterson Scholarship, applied and became the inaugural recipient of the perpetual scholarship.

Don't just follow the waters where they may take you.  Choose a path and things will pop up along the way that help you get to your destination.