Melissa* taking a photo of her celebration lunch for her ACCA scholarship

Read the previous post about her CAT scholarship here 

Melissa*, the girl who wrote her dream, worked and burnt the midnight oil countless times to achieve that dream is now one step closer to realizing her dream. She was recently told that she is one of the recipients of the ACCA scholarship from Jeffrey Cheah’s Foundation!

This is no small sum of money for a scholarship. The amount of money required to study ACCA could come up to a whopping Rm100,000! However, we believe she deserves the scholarship because of her great attitude in giving her best to her studies. Whenever she does not understand certain lessons taught in class, she would consult the lecturer and some clarification. If she still finds it hard to understand, she would ask the smartest student in class or her other classmates for help.

Nearing the end of her CAT, she encountered a great challenge. The Audit paper was challenging and she could not seem to overcome it. She failed her first mock paper (but so did many others in her class, even the smartest student just got slightly higher than a “pass”). She didn’t make it through her second mock paper again and the staff who was  overseeing her progress knew that she needed more help on that paper. Thankfully, the new Home manager of Shelter 2, Gillian, was previously an accountant and she agreed to help Melissa.

Melissa would then travel back on weekends to Shelter 2 just to get extra coaching from Gillian. There was once when all the girls went for a swim. Instead of joining them in swimming, Melissa sat by the pool with Gillian just to run through her notes on the Audit paper.

Today, as she soon embarks her journey to obtain an ACCA qualification, we have faith that she would push through until she makes it to the end. We really want to give a shout out to Jeffrey Cheah and to all of you who have been faithfully supporting us , so that we all can share the joy of seeing this underprivileged girl  break out of the cycle of poverty that her parents were in.

Read about Melissa's next step of her journey here.

*Name has been changed for identity protection purposes