Sat Test

There are a great many high school seniors across the country each year, all vying for scholarships. I came across an excellent website that offers you advice on how to prepare yourself to win the scholarships you apply for. Yes, I did say scholarships, plural. You should apply for as many as possible in order to win the most scholarship. If you qualify for a scholarship, why not apply for it?

At www.collegescholarships.com, there is a page dedicated to strategies for winning scholarships. Once at their website, go to their page on How to Win a Scholarship. Here you’ll learn how to put together scholarship packets, including pictures of yourself, letters of reference from teachers and mentors, gather your high school transcripts, work on a winning essay to wow the scholarship committees and how to put it all together in a binder to best showcase yourself.

You may think that this is tooting your own horn about your accomplishments, and you’d be right. It’s time to let go of your humility and let scholarship committees see how wonderful you are, how involved you’ve become in your community, how hard you’ve worked to maintain your grade point average and how right you are for that particular scholarship. There is a time to be humble and there is a time to recognize your own gifts and talents; this is most definitely the latter. Don’t be shy, you need scholarships and this is how to go about getting them.

To end this blog post I want to showcase a few more odd scholarships that are available out there for the brave, the few, the off the wall…

Fat Acceptance Scholarship ~if you’re from the Northeast portion of the United Sates, and are a bit on the heavy side, you might be in luck. The New England chapter of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance offers $500 tuition scholarships to applicants who write essays on their attitude towards overweight people and size acceptance.

Organ Donation~ No, they’re not asking you for a kidney, at least not yet. The Students for Organ Donation Youth Leadership Award gives out scholarships to full time high school students and undergraduates who have had an active role in raising their community’s awareness of organ donation and organ transplant issues. These scholarships are from $500 to $1,000.

Strike a Pose with your Milk Moustache~ at www.whymilk.com you can see scholarship winners proudly displaying their milk moustaches for all the world to see. And why wouldn’t they have big smiles on their faces? They’ve won scholarships! It’s called the SAMMY, which stands for Scholar Athlete Milk Moustache of the Year Award.

Sweet Tooth Pays Off!~The American Association of Candy Technologists sponsors an annual $5,000 scholarship for undergraduates who eat a lot of candy. Ok, not really. It’s offered for students who are interested in confectionary technology and are majoring in food science, chemical science, biological science and maintain a stunning grade point average in their studies. And you thought that candy was bad for you!

Keep looking, I’m sure you’ll find more than one scholarship that you should apply for and that will make a huge difference in your college experience.

Have you looked for scholarships yet? I went to a high school graduation this year and in the program it listed the senior’s names along with any and all scholarships that they’d gotten to go to college. Some of the names had several prestigious scholarships listed after their names. I was quite impressed and wondered why the list of names with scholarships after them was so short.

I talked to a few parents and found out that their students simply hadn’t made mention to the graduating committee or the committee in charge of the programs that they’d received scholarships. However, the majority of students hadn’t even applied for a single scholarship from the schools they wanted to attend.

Do you know how many scholarships and grants go unclaimed each year simply due to the fact that no one applied for them? The number is higher than you might think. And do you know what this means? It means that there is scholarship money out there waiting for you! Yes, you, the senior in high school with the great G.P.A. and the one with all the leadership skills and the desire to better themselves by getting a degree.

So, what’s the first thing you need to know about how to get a scholarship or grant? It’s simple. Look for them. If you typed ‘college scholarships’ into your favorite Internet search engine, you would come up with massive results. I did just that and got over 19 million hits.

I want you to be wary about giving out personal information when go to websites that offer to give you thousands of free scholarship matches if you just give them your email address and tell them a little about yourself. For instance, at Fastweb they say they can offer you all these free matches because you’re giving them information that they in turn are going to give to lenders and colleges and who knows who else so they can in turn contact you. This is an excellent way to have your email box fill up with spam. I’m not saying that Fastweb isn’t a reliable or a good source for finding available scholarships, I’m simply saying that you need to be selective in what personal information you put out there on the web. If you are able to locate scholarship matches without giving out any personal information, all the better for you and your email box. In fact FastWeb gives you an opt out option at the end of their registration form so you don’t have to have outside sources contact you with offers or more information. If you don’t want your email out there, you might also consider creating a free email address with yahoo or hotmail just for scholarship search purposes. That way you know that your personal email addy won’t be bombarded with spam.

In my next blog post I’ll show you a great strategy for winning the scholarships you want.