QS ImpACT Academic Excellence Scholarship: 2026 winner

London chose me before I fully chose it. I came to the UK for my undergraduate degree, and over four years the city became a kind of intellectual home: the density of research institutions, the cultural diversity, the sense that almost anything is possible if you pursue it seriously.

When it came to postgraduate study, leaving felt like a step backwards. London specifically offers something no other city quite replicates for someone working at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence: UCL, Imperial, King's, the Alan Turing Institute, and DeepMind are all within a few miles of each other. That proximity to the frontier of the field matters enormously to me.

I attended the QS Master's Fair in London in March 2026, before I had received my UCL offer. I went in with a list of programmes I was considering and left with the clarity on my next steps and knowledge of the QS Impact scholarships.

Speaking directly with university representatives in one room, being able to ask the questions that admissions websites never quite answer, compressed what could have been months of uncertainty into a single afternoon.

The most useful part was simply the access: the ability to have a real conversation with people who could speak honestly about what a programme was actually like, not just what the prospectus said.

I read the email and genuinely could not believe what I was seeing. I glanced at "Congratulations Lucky..." and shut my phone and started pacing my room like as if it were a dream I wanted but when given, I did not have the confidence to accept.

And then, this surprised me, I felt something almost like calm. Underneath the calm were butterflies, a kind of quiet electricity. It is a strange combination: the disbelief fades and what replaces it is not euphoria exactly, but a deep sense of being seen. Someone had looked at the work I had done, the impact I was trying to make, and decided it mattered. That feeling has stayed with me longer than the excitement did.

The financial relief is real and significant.

Studying at overseas tuition rates in London is not a small thing, and the scholarship reduces a pressure that would otherwise sit quietly at the edge of every decision I make. But the more lasting impact is psychological.

There is a difference between attending an institution and belonging to it. Being selected for this scholarship, on the basis of research and impact rather than circumstances, has given me a sense of legitimacy that I will carry into every seminar room, every research conversation, and every moment of self-doubt that inevitably comes with postgraduate study.

The part I cannot yet fully see. I know what draws me: computational approaches to neuroscience, the question of how the brain represents and updates its model of the world, the interface between neuroscience and AI. But the most exciting thing is the feeling that my questions are going to get sharper the deeper I go.

I expect to arrive with one set of interests and leave with a more precise version of them and I am genuinely excited to find out what that looks like.

I want to pursue a PhD in computational neuroscience, most likely focused on the intersection of predictive coding, AI, and clinical application.

Beyond academia, I want to build a science communication presence that makes frontier neuroscience genuinely accessible, particularly to communities and countries that rarely see themselves reflected in this kind of research. I am Nepali, and I am acutely aware of how few people who look like me are visible in this field. That is something I intend to change, however incrementally.

Two things.

First: do not wait until your application looks perfect before you submit it. The ImpACT report I submitted was honest about the limitations of my research and I believe that honesty was part of why it was taken seriously.

Second: sit down and ask yourself what you actually want your work to do in the world. Not what sounds impressive, but what genuinely matters to you. The answer to that question is the core of every strong application and once you have found it, the words come much more easily.