Scholarships

A good chunk of your educational income can come from winning scholarships.  While it may feel a bit like playing the lottery, the odds are actually stacked in your favor if you prepare properly.  I am going to put my first set of tips here, but I will update it with more soon.

1) Check with your school’s financial aid department for their scholarship application.  Your school has its own set of awards and grants that are donated by alumni and local businesses.  These are actually pretty easy to win if you hit them with a quality application letter.  Your school most likely will require you to have your FAFSA completed before applying with them.  (I covered the FAFSA in “THE FIRST STEPS”)

2) There are some very, VERY powerful scholarship search engines on the Internet.  The one that I mostly use is FastWeb.  In fact, most counslers will suggest you start your scholarship search with them. It has a very clever search system that ferrets out dozens of scholarships that you probably never even knew existed.

3) The is a new scholarship site that has many scholarships that FastWeb doesn't have. It's FreeScholarshipGuide.com and I highly suggest going here. They have a contest for a $5000 dollar scholarship that you are entered in just for requesting scholarship info from them!

4) Another new site for getting scholarships is ScholarshipExperts.com. They have a fairly large database of scholarships.

5) After you have applied for a few scholarships, take those letters and look them over real good.  You might be able to see how you could merge the best parts into a sort of “power application letter.”  Once you have the perfect letter, you might be able to start mass-applying for the smaller scholarships.  You can gobble up some of those $100 scholarships that you previously weren’t trying for.

6) If you don’t think you’re a strong writer, check with sites such as EssayEdge for help in making your application letters more professional.

7) Don't forget to check other scholarship sites!! FastWeb has the largest content, but that doesn't mean it is the only place that you can get your money from. Try some other sites to find rare scholarships that might apply to you. (Some even have contests for free $$$)