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I’ve had a few questions sent to me about finding, applying for, and receiving scholarships, so I thought I would give a very simple introduction to scholarships today. When I was in my senior year of high school I spent a large amount of time applying for scholarships and was able to receive enough financial aid to cover the entire cost of my undergraduate degree as well as extra spending money. Here are my initial thoughts on the issue.

APPLY! Most people do not take out the time to seek out scholarships and apply. This of course is the number one factor to receiving more scholarship money. There are thousands of scholarships out there if you are willing to look for them. A very common thought by graduates is that there are too many qualified kids out there who will win all these scholarships. You need to realize that most people think this! Because of this many great scholarships get very limited number of applicants. The more scholarships you apply to the better odds you have of receiving them. Thousands of scholarships receive one, two or even zero applications! This is ridiculous. This is free money.

Let’s do a simple exercise on the value of a scholarship to the average student. Let’s consider a very small scholarship with a value of $500. A typical scholarship might take an hour to 2 hours to fill out. After you’ve done half a dozen or so, the time needed for this is drastically reduced. But for our experiment’s purpose let us assume it takes you 2 hours to fill out this scholarship. If you do receive it, then you just made yourself $250 per hour! When was the last time you, as an 18 year old student, made $250 an hour? I bet you have never received this kind of return in your life. Now let’s even assume that you have to apply to 10 scholarships of $500 value to receive one. If it still took you 2 hours per application (which is HIGHLY unlikely) then you still made $25 per hour on your time spent. How many hours do you work at the mall or mowing yards to make $500? Probably much longer than 10 hours.

People ask where do you find these scholarships? Well a simple google search can yield hundreds if not more. There are also many websites such as fastweb, scholarships.com and many, many others that allow you to enter in factors about yourself and this will return a number of scholarships that fit your factors. While this is a great service, fastweb is doing this for thousands of other students and will offer many of the same scholarships.

Visit your local bookstore and check the scholarship section. Each year Kaplan among others releases a book full of thousands and thousands of scholarships. Both these resources are useful, but often these scholarships are available nationwide and are known by thousands.

My favorite two places to find scholarships are family/friends and your guidance counselor. Visit your guidance counselor! That is what they are there for. These people are drastically underutilized and often have years of experience helping kids finance their education. Ask your counselor for a list of all scholarships she is aware of, particularly local scholarships. The easiest scholarships to receive are the ones that are local and unknown. This limits the number of people who are both able to apply and those who know to apply.

Friends and family are great for the same reasons. These people know the community and will often know of a few random scholarships that are not well known and have few applicants. Many large and small companies offer local scholarships. They also often have scholarships that are specifically for the children or relatives of their company, so make sure your parents check with their employers for these hidden gems.

In terms of the applications, for the most part they should be relatively simple and straightforward. They will want your GPA, extracurricular activities, and any other pertinent details. Many of these scholarships will also require you to write an essay or two. While this is a time consuming process, after 4 or 5 essays you will likely have written over enough topics to cover 95% of applications. Make sure that you have these essays proofread by as many people as possible. A grammatical or spelling error can make the difference between winning or losing a scholarship. At this point you should have a repertoire of essays and filling out 3 or 4 per week should not be particularly difficult.

My last thought to remember would be that scholarships add up! If you continue to receive a few hundred to a thousand dollars at a time this can really add up. You don’t realize just how much of a difference this can make once you enter college. $500 may seem insignificant but I promise this is a significant amount of money once you are away from home. It can be the difference between getting a new car for graduation or sticking with the 92’ Honda. It could also mean the difference between working that first semester or having some time to get oriented and have some fun. More importantly, it can make the difference for many students between ending up with thousands (or more) in debt, or graduating college debt free.

Keep applying and good luck.