November to March: Busy Season for Scholarship Applications
Each scholarship, grant, or contest application has its own individual due date, but a lot of school and organizational scholarships start accepting applications in the fall and close submissions in the early spring. Remember, its never too early to find money for school, but it can be too late!
Turning Hobbies into Financial Aid
You never know what types of hobbies or interests might be worth money for college.
College Scholarships.Org recently announced the winners of their recent Blogging Scholarship. This contest is a great example of how students can turn hobbies into a financial advantage for college and shows that sometimes you can be recognized for doing things you might have done anyway. Reading the commentary by the top ranked bloggers, it seems like this contest was a great source of inspiration and got them thinking about new and creative ways to promote their websites. A lot of the finalists and winners reported that their website traffic has increased and they’ve made a lot of new connections.
Internet marketing and website building is not just a great way to communicate ideas across great distances, its a real-world skill that’s highly in demand. Not only will winning a contest like this provide immediate payments toward college, but everyone who seriously competes will be learning new techniques that will apply in their education and career.
Its important for students to remember that not even scholarship is concerned with things like GPA, test scores, and income bracket. A lot of the scholarship providers are particularly interested in activity.
Find Scholarships that Match your Eligibility
And regularly update your profile!
Free online scholarship searches are a great way to get started on finding information about specific competitions and financial aid opportunities, but they are not all created equal.
- ScholarshipExperts.com - Highly accurate search results save a ton of time when it comes to determining which awards the student is eligible for. Scholarship Experts doesn’t return as many results as some of the other scholarship search sites, but each award result is specifically matched to the user’s profile. Their total database is huge, so when considering the number of awards each user is eligible for, they’re probably at the top.
- Scholarships.com - Returns a lot of accurate results, ordered in an scale of “relevancy” that really helps sort out the scholarships in a useful way. I found a couple of awards I’m not eligible for, but they were automatically sent to the bottom of the list.
- Fastweb.com - Is nationally known and drives a ton of online traffic. The website shows a lot of returns on my profile, but some of the awards are just obviously not for me. I got results for other races, genders, locations, and majors - so the fact that I found 110 scholarships doesn’t help me save time since I have to go through and see which ones I can even apply for.
Start Early!
There is almost no such thing as starting too early when it comes to planning for paying for college. Many essay, poetry, and science competitions are open to high school students and students as young as 13 years old. You may not know what you want to major in when you’re a high school freshman, but you do have hobbies and interests that can act as a stepping stone to a professional career and even a way to pay for that training.
Joining high school clubs that match your interests is one way to advance your education and academic credibility while having fun. Music, newspapers, student government, sports, science fairs, and creative writing can all add to your future college applications, and they may even make you eligible to apply for scholarships and contests while you’re still in high school.