Scholarship
Finding More Scholarship Sources
It takes more than making the grades and scoring high on the SATs for students to be college-bound. Each year, students are faced with the burden of figuring out how they are going to pay for their college education. Knowing how and where to search for aid can make the difference in rather or not many students will be able to attend college.
Outside from personal or family savings, there are government grants, federal or personal loans, and scholarships. Government grants are almost always limited and only cover a fraction of the total cost of attending college. Federal and personal loans are debt, which has to be repaid after graduating. Loans are great resources for covering expenses left over after there is no other source of income available. Scholarships are, for some students, the only hope for attending college with little or no upfront cash and without piling up thousands of dollars of debt.
Each year, there are billions of dollars of free scholarship money that goes unclaimed. Students are just not aware that this money is available. The most visible scholarship monies are offered by large corporations and charities. These scholarships receive thousands of applications for a small pot of available money. It is usually the local, community based scholarships that are overlooked by students.
When applying for scholarships, students must be as diverse as possible with their search. National organizations advertise there scholarship opportunities in widely distributed media outlets. The competition for these scholarships is very high and is limited to a few exceptional students. Students should continue to apply for these scholarships despite the competitiveness, but broadening their search to local opportunities will be to their advantage.
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Develop Your Scholarship Game Plan
To mount an effective scholarship campaign, the first thing you need is a winning game plan. Start by implementing the following four key action strategies.
1. Plan to apply for as many scholarships as possible
Some students make the mistake of thinking that they maximize their chances of winning by pouring all of their energy into one or two scholarships.
But applying for scholarships is partially a numbers game. A variety of factors outside of your control affect the outcome of any given award. Only by applying for large numbers of scholarships can you minimize such factors, and maximize your chances of winning. In my own scholarship quest, I ended up applying for about three dozen awards.
Even if the scholarship prize is only a couple of hundred dollars, I still recommend entering the contest. This might not sound like much in the context of an entire college tuition bill, but the extra cash can help cover the cost of books for a term, or help pay for that spring break “research” trip to Cancun.
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Listing Education on a Resume
So you’ve gone to the time, expense and effort to complete some aspect of formal education. Or maybe you started to work on this, but then inevitably, life happened… had to take a job to pay the bills, got married, had kids, moved, etc. etc. There’s a universe of things that life can throw at you that can interrupt even the most well-intentioned plans for education.
There are some rules of thumb out there when listing education on a resume which should be considered.
1. DON’T list the year you graduated. Unless you are in an education, government, scientific or highly technical field where having a date of graduation is essential, please don’t broadcast how old you are by including this information. (Human resource managers do the math!) Sure, if you are an adult learner who just got done with a degree, it’s new and important to you just like it is to a person fresh out of high school who immediately went to college. However, resist the temptation to perhaps look younger by listing the graduation date!
With the exception of the four fields mentioned above, the cold, hard truth about education is this:
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