I finally applied for an award/scholarship or as some would call it, “free money.” It took me forever, but I figured that if I’m going to preach about college scholarships and financial assistance, I might as well apply for it to see what the process is like.
If you want to graduate college with zero debt, you need to be ready to take advantage of all resources available to you.
I wanted to share some important facts about the “free money” that is known as a college scholarship:
Scholarships for college students are everywhere.
Free money for college seems like a revolutionary idea but it really isn’t. Once I opened my eyes to how accessible college scholarships are I started noticing them everywhere.
My work has a scholarship available, a few small businesses in the area have scholarships, the local branch of my bank has a scholarship, and even my dad’s work offers a program for family members.
There are many other places offering scholarships for college students if you open your eyes to look.
Your scholarship doesn’t have to be an academic one.
Not all of us will get straight A’s.
Your scholarship doesn’t have to be all about your grades. Many college students worry about applying for scholarships because they think that since they don’t have a 4.0 GPA then they won’t make the cut. One thing that I found while looking through the list of scholarships/awards offered at my University I realized that there are many different categories: scholarships for students that work full time, for students of every different major, for students that pursue entrepreneurial ventures, and many more.
The college scholarship essay is worth the effort.
How much do you get paid at work right now? Is it worth the money? Imagine getting paid $500 for one hour of work?
I’ll be completely upfront here and tell you guys that whenever I saw that a scholarship had an essay to write I immediately changed my mind about the whole college scholarship. That’s a horrible way of looking at it because the time invested into the essay could be worth thousands of dollars. If the college scholarship company is willing to give you anywhere from $1000 to $20,000 then they why not write an essay that will take you an hour? It takes most college students hundreds of hours of work to earn that much money, so an hour or so doesn’t seem that bad. Worst case scenario is you don’t get the scholarship and you use the essay for your next application.
The take home point is that I don’t care how busy you claim you are this summer or any other excuse you come up with.
I want every college student reading this right now to apply for a scholarship before September rolls around. When you do please share your experiences here in the comments section.
You are absolutely right there is no need of high grade to get fully funded scholarship in college/ universities.
You just have to take advantage of opportunities you get in your life.