| From Shah J.
Chaudhry, Your Guide to College Admissions: U.S.. FREE Newsletter. Sign up now! |
Once you have asked yourself these questions and fully gauged your position, next comes the step of going out and taking advantage of the various information resources that are available to you.
Go visit your college counselor, check out the local library for more information, or talk to some relevant person in a community you belong to.
It is a general misconception amongst most people that scholarships are only reserved for either students who have perfect grades or outstanding test scores or for students who have pressing financial troubles and cannot afford college otherwise. As mentioned before, this is a very big misconception, in fact, 90 percent of private scholarships are not concerned with grades whatsoever, and 80 percent of these scholarships do not ask for any proof of income.
Your first step should be to fill out the FAFSA (previously mentioned, scroll up for more information). The FAFSA is easily available online or you can get it at any college office. You should send your form as soon as you can because these forms are entertained on the basis of first come, first served.
One thing to keep in mind through the whole process is that you can never apply for enough scholarships. So do not only depend on FAFSA, take full advantage of other resources available to you. The local library has directories of scholarships that can prove to be very helpful in these situations.
Preparing in Advance:
You should prepare in advance for your scholarship hunt because it maximizes
your chances of getting a scholarship. There are a few things you will have to
do in order to start your preparation in advance.
A lot of people believe that scholarship committees look for people who have a well rounded background. Well, if truth be told, if every had a well rounded background, college life would be kind of dull, wouldn�t it? In the eyes of the scholarship committees, it is better to excel at one thing. We are not asking you to leave everything else, be well rounded and have different activities but concentrate on one single activity that you are passionate about and the activity you can take up as a hobby. Scholarship committee members can easily distinguish which activities are genuine hobbies and which have been undertaken merely for the sake of credentials.
Scholarships concentrate on diversity, therefore, it is very important that you take up a single hobby and go deeply into it. It increases your chances of getting a scholarship. Of course, you should explore a lot of different options but stick to the one thing you feel most passionately about. And remember, where scholarship committees are concerned, quality is indeed much more important than quantity.
Start practicing as early as possible for your admissions tests. Buy preparation books in advance, and sit down and study hard. These books usually have self-test papers or past papers at the end. Take those tests and see how you fare. Recognize your weaknesses and try to eliminate them. Recognize your strengths and build upon them.
There are some scholarship committees that let you apply for the same scholarship twice, for instance, once in your senior year and the second time when you are a first year graduate student. As the saying goes, if at first you don�t succeed: try, try, and try again. Well, if you get rejected from these scholarships once, most of them allow you to have a look at the reviewer�s comments. If they allow that, then ask for a copy of the reviewer�s comments and see why you failed. The comments are usually very specific. Try to improve yourself with the help of these comments and apply again next year and chances are, you will win the scholarship.
We can now move on and tackle the difficult task of looking for scholarships on the Internet.