How to Find College Scholarships

Where to look for financial aid

By Lili Melton

Searching and applying for scholarships can be a daunting task; however, with three easy steps, you will be on your way to applying for numerous local, in-school, sports, activity, and academic related scholarships.

• Conduct a survey concerning your family background. Find out as much details about your family as possible: heritage of great grandparents to parents, college status, jobs held, and much more because all of these factors will lead to meeting scholarships’ qualifications for application. For example, if you are the first person in your family to attend college, there are scholarships; if you are the first female, especially of a minority ethnic background, there are many scholarships available; if you are from a family of migrant workers, you qualify for certain scholarships. The list is endless; so conduct a quick survey to detail your family background.
• Speak to your high school educators: Your counselor, the career center counselor/technician, athletic director, coaches, and teachers. These individuals have the latest information concerning scholarships; can provide you with, as well as recommended you for, the local, academic, sports, and activity scholarships that are being offered; will direct you to beneficial website searches such as, fastweb.com. More importantly, get to know your counselor on a first-name basis because the counselors are usually the first educators to make recommendations for local, and at times, national scholarships.
• Create a free account on collegeboard.com. This site provides access to all of the colleges and universities within America, as well as latest scholarships. When creating an account be honest and specific because the questionnaire completed gives the system detailed information about imperative and crucial aspects of who you are which careers you may be interested in, what types of college institutions you are interested in (private, public, large, small), volunteer work, types of jobs held, clubs and activities participated in, honors and academic awards obtained. An extreme important endeavor is for you to discover, explore, and research about yourself. Once you have created this account, collegeboard.com will keep you abreast of colleges/universities that meet your standards and match your personality; and more importantly, will recommend scholarships that you meet qualifications for application; if you don’t understand all of the terms, collegeboard.com explains everything in detail.

Applying for scholarships can be an easy process: complete the three easy steps; be proactive in completing scholarships; complete applications for as many scholarships as possible you can never apply for too many. Millions of dollars are waiting to be awarded so apply, apply, apply!