Welcome! This is an extremely busy time for parents and students that are applying to college. Whether you are working on your resume or an application, it is important to stay organized and make sure that you are continually focused on the bigger picture.
Want to know one of the things that typically escape parents though?
Scholarships.
Most families have an incorrect view of scholarships - they think that the application process is linear:
Identify colleges
Apply to colleges
Fill out FAFSA
Receive college decisions
Apply for scholarships
Receive scholarship awards
This is INCORRECT.
Today we are going to speak about the dangers of this approach and how families SHOULD approach scholarship applications.
The Danger of Waiting
If you wait to apply to scholarships, the biggest risk you will face is that all of the scholarship dollars will already be given out.
That is because scholarships are not waiting for college decisions to decide who wins a scholarship.
For example, Coca Cola scholarship applicants will be notified that they are semi-finalists on 11/9/23. That means that if you thought you could wait to apply for a Coca Cola scholarship after your applications were done, you already missed the opportunity.
And unfortunately, the scholarship game is often a single chance opportunity. If you don’t apply for the scholarship in time, you won’t get a chance to reapply. The money is gone, and you won’t get a second chance.
If that raises alarms, good! We don’t want you to miss out on scholarship opportunities that could significantly improve your financial aid to attend your dream school, especially when many colleges will provide you with a financial aid package that is loaded with loans.
Why take loans when you could have had scholarships to reduce or eliminate the loans?
What to do now
The best policy with scholarships is to prepare ahead of time so you build your scholarship applications into your overall application process.
That way, your schedule already incorporates the scholarship applications and you don’t miss opportunities.
Unfortunately, that may not be an option at the moment.
First, don’t panic. All you can do is address what is coming up next.
Secondly, you want to try to utilize a resource to find as many scholarships as you can. There are online resources for free (scholarships.com is a good resource) but there are also paid sources that show all of the scholarships that are available.
Only you can decide the best way to approach this, but our recommendation is you want something that is as detailed and organized as possible, but so much of the information is available for free if you happen to know where to look.
Third, you want to integrate scholarship applications into your schedule. Our recommendation is to choose 3-4 scholarships a week and design a schedule where you work through those applications each week. Don’t try to do too much too soon - this is a marathon, not a sprint. You want to choose the most compelling scholarships for you, assess if you are a strong candidate, and then start applying.
The sooner you apply, the better your chances to win some scholarship money.
If you can tackle this, you can put yourself in a better position to win early scholarship money while everyone else is focused on just doing their college applications.