The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

I am a current sophomore engineering student in school fall 2025. I am applying now to smart scholarship. As I understand, I will find out around April if I get the smart scholarship and it will start Fall 2026. I am considering accepting an industry coop position for the spring semester and summer 2026, where my college transcript will show this coop but no classes for spring 2026. Will this still be acceptable for my smart scholarship application? I am hoping so because this is all before I would actually start the smart scholarship and I will not have any other industry coop work experiences after this.

It should be fine, there isn't really a place in the application to include future schoolwork. I'd strongly recommend not even mentioning it at all in your application if the co-op isn't DoD related.

If you are awarded, funding would begin in the Fall semester of the following year, but will start in August. This shouldn't be a problem for you unless the co-op runs into the Fall 2026 Semester. The first SMART Internship would be the following year in Summer 2027.