For advisors and student organisations
Please share this
with your students.
Pell to Planet is a free, independent guide built by a Wayne State undergraduate as the Follow-on Service Project for his Gilman Scholarship. It is written for the students who never make it as far as your office.
What it is
A real case study,
not a brochure.
The centre of the site is one student's complete, sourced accounting of a two-week faculty-led program: the program fee, the tuition share, the flight, the on-the-ground spending, the awards, and the dates every payment and disbursement actually landed.
Around it sit a funding directory, a Gilman guide, a gap calculator and a planning timeline. Everything is free, contains no advertising and no analytics, and works without an account.
On accuracy. Every figure carries a source and a verified-on date. Where a number is not confirmed, the site says so rather than estimating. Rules and amounts are explicitly framed as snapshots, and students are directed to the official page in every case.
Who it is written for
- Pell-eligible students who have already decided study abroad is not for them
- Engineering and business students who assume short programs do not carry real academic value
- First-generation students with nobody in their family who has done this before
- Any student who needs to see a real budget before they will believe the brochure
What it is not
It is not an official Wayne State publication, and it does not give financial advice or make any promise about an award. Every page routes individual questions back to the financial aid office and to the scholarship's own site.
Three asks
If it is useful, here is
what would help most.
Share the link
Advising pages, a study abroad newsletter, a pre-departure email, or a slide in an information session. The copy block on this page is written to be forwarded as-is.
Point students at the calculator
It is built so a student can arrive at your office with their own numbers already worked out, and a specific question rather than a vague worry.
Tell me what is wrong
If a figure, a rule or an office detail is out of date or incorrect, I want to fix it. Corrections are welcome and I will credit the source.
Ready to forward
A paragraph you can paste.
Written so it can go straight into a newsletter, an advising page or an email without editing. Please do change it to fit your own voice if that helps.
Pell to Planet — a student-built guide to funding short-term study abroad One of our students, Gotibeh Alhady (Mechanical Engineering), has built a free guide for Pell-eligible students who assume study abroad is out of reach financially. It is his Follow-on Service Project for the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship. It covers: - the full itemised cost of a real two-week, credit-bearing program, with sources - how term aid splits across a term versus trip-specific awards - a gap calculator and a backward-planning timeline students can fill in - what to say when asking about a cost-of-attendance review - an honest account of what the program was actually like It is free to share and is not an official university publication. https://alhady101.github.io/pell-to-planet/