Out of 8,000 international applicants, only 95 people were selected to receive the 2025 Gates Cambridge Scholarship and a Filipino international student in Toronto, Niño Jan Pol Dosdos, is among them.
“I’m still absorbing the news,” Dosdos says. “For one, I am the first in the family to earn a university degree and now a Gates Cambridge Scholar.”
The full scholarship at the University of Cambridge Graduate Studies will help fund Dosdos’ master’s degree in Philosophy and Anthropological Research. It’s a nine-month program that could have cost him almost £55,000 or close to CAD 100,000.
“In my Gates Cambridge interview, they asked me what was something unique about me, and I told them, my work in the community preceded my academic pursuits,” Dosdos says.
The scholarship, known to have an acceptance rate of about one per cent, is given to individuals meeting the criteria of having outstanding intellectual abilities, leadership potential, and being committed to using their educational attainment to contribute positively to society and the world.
Dosdos, who spent years as a student and youth leader in the Philippines before migrating to Canada as an international student in 2021, has been actively engaging with Indigenous communities in his hometown of Zamboanga del Sur and in rural communities.
“Working in projects such as disaster response, mental health… that inspired me to do anthropology because anthropology is all about studying what it means to be human, what differences mean, and how we can make the world safer for human differences,” he says.
Dosdos says he originally had no plans to pursue graduate studies after recently graduating from the University of Toronto as a scholar with a double major in Anthropology and Public Policy.
Unlike the usual international student pathway in Canada, he says becoming a permanent resident in the country is not a priority, especially since he’s planning to pursue a career in academia.
“I have to accept the fact that I will not be positioned in the same place forever,” he says.
Dosdos is the sixth Filipino to receive the Gates scholarship since its inception in 2000, and the only Filipino recipient this year. He is set to start his program in England in October.
