How to Follow Up on a Bursary Application

You submitted everything weeks ago and now there is only silence. Should you email? Phone? Wait? Done properly, a follow-up is a professional habit that keeps your application visible; done badly, it can annoy the very people deciding your future. Here is exactly when to follow up, who to contact, and what to say — word for word.

Updated August 2026 · 13 min read

The hardest part of a bursary application is not the forms, the certified copies, or even the motivational letter. It is the waiting. You hit submit, you get a confirmation email (if you’re lucky), and then the whole thing disappears into a black box for weeks or months. Every ping on your phone raises your heart rate. Every day without news starts to feel like a quiet rejection. I remember sitting with a student I’d helped with applications, watching her refresh her inbox three times an hour for a month, convinced that silence meant no. It didn’t — she was shortlisted in the eighth week. The silence meant nothing except that selection committees move at their own pace, not yours. This guide is about how to live in that waiting period like a professional: when it is right to follow up, how to do it without hurting your chances, and what to say when you do.

First, a mindset adjustment. A follow-up is not begging, and it is not pestering — as long as it is done at the right time, through the right channel, in the right tone. Bursary administrators expect follow-ups. They deal with them every cycle. What they remember negatively is not the student who sent one polite, well-timed email; it is the student who phoned five times in a week, or the parent who demanded to know “what is taking so long”. Your goal in any follow-up is simple: confirm that your application was received and is complete, signal that you are organised and serious, and get a realistic sense of the timeline. Nothing more. You are not trying to charm your way onto a shortlist over the phone — you are doing quiet, competent administration, which is exactly the quality funders want to fund.

Before you follow up: check what you already know

Most unnecessary follow-ups happen because the applicant never wrote down the information that was already in front of them. Before you compose a single email, gather your facts. Open the original bursary advertisement, the application page, or the confirmation email, and look for three things: the closing date, the stated response timeline, and the contact details they gave for queries.

The stated timeline is the crucial one. Many funders tell you, somewhere in the fine print or the auto-reply, when to expect news: “shortlisted candidates will be contacted by end of November”, or “if you have not heard from us within 60 days of the closing date, consider your application unsuccessful”. That sentence governs everything. If they said shortlisted candidates will be contacted by end of November, an email in early October asking about progress achieves nothing except adding noise to an inbox that is already drowning. Worse, some funders explicitly state that no correspondence will be entered into — which means your follow-up cannot even expect a reply.

• Find the closing date. The timeline usually runs from the closing date, not from the day you personally submitted.
• Find the stated response window. “By end of November”, “within 90 days”, “shortlisted candidates only” — write it down.
• Find the official query channel. Some funders give a dedicated bursaries email address or a reference number to quote. Use exactly what they gave you.
• Find your reference number. If the system issued one, it goes in every subject line you ever send them.

If the advertisement said nothing about timelines at all, a reasonable rule of thumb for South African bursary cycles is to wait at least four to six weeks after the closing date before any follow-up, and to treat three months of silence after the closing date as the point where you should be activating your other options regardless of what you eventually hear.

The follow-up timeline: when each message is appropriate

Three moments in the cycle when contact is legitimate — and one when it never is.

Think of follow-ups as a small number of permitted moments, each with its own purpose. You do not get unlimited contact, so spend it deliberately.

The first moment deserves explanation because it is the one students skip, and it is the most valuable. If you submitted online and received no confirmation email, no reference number, and no “your application has been received” page — or you emailed documents and got no acknowledgement — a short receipt-check email within the first week is entirely appropriate and genuinely useful. Applications do go missing: portals time out, attachments over the size limit bounce silently, and email addresses get mistyped. Finding out in week one that your application never arrived is recoverable. Finding out in month three is not.

The second and third moments are the classic status follow-ups, and the rule for both is the same: once per funder, then wait. If you emailed and got no reply after a full working week, one phone call is acceptable. If the phone call yields “decisions are still being made”, that is your answer, and your next move is patience, not another email the following week. A useful discipline: every time you feel the urge to follow up again, write the date in your tracking sheet instead. If you have already contacted them within the last three to four weeks, the urge is anxiety, not information — and anxiety is not a reason to email.

Finding the right person to contact

Who you contact matters almost as much as what you say. Sending your follow-up to the wrong address — the general info inbox, the CEO’s PA, the company’s switchboard — either delays a reply or gets you remembered for the wrong reason. Work through the options in this order:

• The address or number given in the bursary advertisement. This is always first choice. If the ad said “queries: bursaries@company.co.za”, that inbox is staffed by people whose job includes answering you.
• The bursary portal’s help or query function. For large schemes like NSFAS, the status check lives inside your online account — log in first and read your application status before emailing anyone. Most “where is my application” questions answer themselves on the portal.
• The company’s graduate recruitment or HR page. Corporate bursaries usually sit inside the careers section of the company website, and that section often names a contact person or team.
• The financial aid office of your university. For university-administered bursaries, the financial aid office is the correct and only sensible door. They answer queries like yours daily.
• Your school, for school-nominated awards. If the bursary came through your school, your LO teacher or principal may have a direct contact and can ask on your behalf — which often carries more weight than a student email.

What you are looking for is the person who administrates the bursary, not the person who sponsors it. A bursary funded by a mining group but administered by an outside bursary-management company is handled by the management company — their name is usually at the bottom of the application form. Direct your follow-up to the administrators, always.

Email etiquette: the follow-up that gets answered

Email is your default channel for almost every follow-up, because it creates a paper trail, lands with the right person even when they are busy, and lets them reply when they have an answer rather than while you wait on the line. But a follow-up email has to earn its reply. Administrators can tell in two lines whether the sender is organised or chaotic, and that impression sticks to your application.

A follow-up email that works has five parts, and none of them is optional:

• A subject line that does the work. Format it as: your reference number (if you have one), your full name, and the purpose. Example: “Ref 2026/ENG/0412 — Thandi Mokoena — application status enquiry”. An administrator should be able to file and find your email from the subject line alone.
• One sentence identifying yourself. Full name, ID number if they used it in correspondence, the bursary name, and the date you applied. No life story.
• One sentence stating what you are asking. Be specific: “Could you confirm that my application was received and is complete?” or “The advertisement indicated decisions by end of November; may I ask whether shortlisting has been concluded?” One question per email.
• A polite close that asks for nothing extra. “Thank you for your time — I appreciate that the selection process is a busy one.” Then your full name, phone number, and the email address you applied with.
• Nothing else. No attachments unless requested, no re-sent CV, no paragraphs about how much the bursary would mean to you. That was the motivational letter’s job.

Tone is where students stumble. The two failure modes are grovelling and demanding, and both read badly. Grovelling — “I am desperately hoping, this is my only chance, please consider me” — puts the reader in an uncomfortable position and adds nothing to your case. Demanding — “I submitted two months ago and expect an update” — is worse, because it is rude to a person who holds real power over your application and has done nothing wrong. The register you want is the one you’d use with a lecturer you respect: warm, direct, brief, and confident. You are a future professional checking on an administrative process. Write like one.

A few mechanical rules. Send from the same email address you applied with, and make sure that address is something respectable — firstname.surname@, not a nickname from grade 8. Keep the whole email under 150 words. Proofread it twice; a follow-up riddled with errors quietly undermines the careful application you sent. And send it during working hours on a weekday. An email sent at 1am on a Sunday says something about the sender, whether that is fair or not.

One clear question, quoted reference number, under 150 words, from the address you applied with. That is the entire formula.

Phone etiquette: when calling beats writing

Phoning is the second-line tool, not the first. Use it when an email has gone unanswered for a full working week, when a deadline is genuinely close (for example, you need to know whether to accept another offer), or when the funder’s advertisement lists a phone number as the query channel. For big national schemes, check whether a dedicated call centre exists — some publish helpline numbers precisely so that individual administrators are not phoned directly.

Before you dial, prepare. Have your reference number, ID number, and application date in front of you, and write down the one question you are asking. Decide what you will say in the first ten seconds, because that is how long you have to sound like someone worth helping: “Good morning, my name is Sipho Dlamini. I applied for the 2026 engineering bursary in July, reference number 2026/ENG/0412. I emailed last week about the status of applications and wanted to follow up.” That is it. Calm, complete, thirty seconds of airtime at most.

During the call, a few rules carry you far. Ask whether it is a good time before launching in — administrators are people with meetings and deadlines, and the courtesy is noticed. Take notes while you talk: the name of the person you spoke to, the date, and exactly what they said. If they say “decisions will be out in three weeks”, write it down and set a reminder for four weeks, not two and a half. Never argue, never push for hints about your chances, and never ask them to “put in a good word”. If the answer is that there is no news yet, thank them genuinely and get off the line. You will be remembered as the pleasant one — and in a process where the same people may interview you later, that is worth more than you think.

One practical warning: keep calls to working hours, roughly 9am to 4pm on weekdays, and avoid Monday mornings and Friday afternoons if you want a patient conversation. And if a parent or guardian phones on your behalf, they should say so upfront and keep the same discipline — administrators are generally understanding about a parent calling, but an aggressive parent can do real damage to a student’s file. Whoever calls, the rules are identical: one question, full courtesy, short call.

What to say — and what never to say

The content of a good follow-up is boring, and that is the point. You are confirming facts, not re-arguing your case. These are the questions that are always legitimate:

• “Could you confirm that my application was received and that all my documents are in order?”
• “The advertisement mentioned decisions around [date] — may I ask whether that timeline still holds?”
• “Is there any further information or documentation you need from me at this stage?”
• “I have received another offer with a response deadline — may I ask when decisions are expected, so I can respond appropriately?” (This one is not only acceptable, it is wise; funders would rather know.)

And these are the approaches that always backfire:

• Asking for hints. “How did my application look?” or “Do I stand a chance?” puts the administrator in a position they cannot and will not answer, and it reads as insecure.
• Re-motivating. Your follow-up is not a second motivational letter. Adding “I just want to say again how passionate I am about engineering” to a status enquiry dilutes both.
• Complaining about the wait. Even gently phrased, even when justified. The person reading your email did not design the timeline.
• Going over their head. Emailing the CEO’s office because the administrator didn’t reply in three days is the fastest route to a black mark. Escalate only after weeks of genuine non-response, and even then, escalate to a named alternative contact, not the top of the org chart.
• Mass-emailing the whole department. If you CC five addresses at the same organisation, five people now assume someone else replied. One address, one message.

If you hear nothing at all

Sometimes, despite doing everything right, the answer is permanent silence. Many South African bursaries operate on a “if you haven’t heard by date X, you were unsuccessful” basis, which means a large number of applicants will simply never be told no. That is discourteous but common, and you need a plan for it.

The plan is this: after your one email and, if needed, one call, you stop following up and you shift your energy to parallel options. Silence beyond three months after the closing date is, for practical purposes, a no — and the correct response to a no is never to wait harder. It is to make sure the rest of your funding strategy is alive: other bursaries in the current cycle, your institution’s financial aid office, government schemes you qualify for, and next year’s applications, which you will start earlier and aim wider. Students who treat every application as one ticket in a portfolio handle silence far better than students who pin everything on a single award.

There is one exception worth knowing: if you were interviewed and then heard nothing, a follow-up carries slightly more weight, because interview-stage candidates are few and the administrators know you by name. A single polite email two weeks after the date they gave you is entirely appropriate, and it is fair to ask directly whether the process has concluded.

Build the follow-up habit into a tracking system

Every piece of advice in this guide gets easier if you are tracking your applications properly. A simple spreadsheet or notebook page with one row per bursary — funder name, closing date, date you applied, reference number, contact details, stated decision date, and a log of every contact you make — turns the anxious fog of waiting into an orderly list. When you feel the urge to follow up, you consult the sheet: did the stated date pass? Have I already contacted them this month? The sheet answers, not your nerves. It also means that when an administrator phones you unexpectedly, you can find the right file in seconds and sound like the organised applicant you are.

And keep your phone answered and your email checked during decision season. An astonishing number of bursaries are lost to voicemail boxes that are full, numbers that changed after the application, and shortlist emails sitting unread in a spam folder. Check spam weekly. Answer unknown numbers during the months decisions are due. Update your contact details with the funder if anything changes. Following up is not only about you reaching them — it is about being reachable when they finally reach for you.

A final word

The students who handle the waiting period well share one habit: they replace anxiety with administration. They note the stated timeline, follow up once at the right moment, in the right tone, through the right channel, and then get on with their parallel plans. One clear email with a reference number and a single question will never cost you a bursary. Silence, missed calls, and a full voicemail box cost students funding every year. Be the applicant who is easy to reach, easy to help, and easy to remember for the right reasons.

This guide is reviewed and updated as funding cycles change; it was last updated in August 2026. Timelines and contact channels vary by funder — always follow the instructions in the specific bursary advertisement and on the funder’s official website. Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice.