5 Strategies for Completing Scholarships Applications
Everyone advocates to apply for scholarships to help pay for college, but now is the time to dive in and do it. Knowing you want to put your best foot forward to win as many scholarships as you can, consider these tips when completing your scholarship applications.
1. Narrow the List of Scholarships
There are thousands of scholarships out there so it can be overwhelming to find the ones that you are eligible for. We suggest that you use the following resources in your search:
- Your college counselor
- The financial aid team at the colleges you are planning to apply for admission
- Your local nonprofits, religious or community organizations, local businesses, and civic groups, especially if you or your family have a connection with them
- Your or your parents’ employers
- Scholarship search websites like Fastweb, Scholarships.com, CollegeBoard’s scholarship search and other free scholarship search website
2. Every Scholarship Dollar Counts
Don’t just apply for the big money scholarships. There are a ton of smaller dollar scholarships that often have less people applying. For scholarships, you may have a 1 out of 5,000 chance to get the scholarship. For a smaller scholarship, you may have a 1 out of 15 chance.
Pro Tip:
Scholarships with more requirements often have less applicants. If a scholarship wants a 1,000 word essay, it will have less students complete than a one-sentence scholarship. Also, scholarships requiring videos, artwork, or projects may get less responses than scholarships that ask only demographic questions.
3. Develop a Scholarship Deadline Calendar
Scholarship applications deadlines are happening all the time; however, many scholarship applications focus their deadlines in the spring. If you create a deadline calendar, you can space out completing your scholarship applications to ensure that your application can shine. Too often students experience scholarship application fatigue when they complete the essays or submission material last minute.
When you review the application details for the scholarship deadline calendar, identify similarities in the applications. For instance, you may find that many of them ask for a personal statement or ask a similar essay question. If this is the case, you can put more time into this response and even ask for one or more teachers or friends to review your response. This being said don’t try to try to fit an essay that you created into a scholarship application that doesn’t fit. Scholarship organizations ask their questions for specific reasons and can tell when you are trying to fit a circle into a square. If something you wrote previously is related, then freshen it up with content that relates to your scholarship organizations’s spin on it.
4. Know Which Scholarships Need Recommendations & Transcripts
Similar to many college admission applications, some scholarship organizations require one or more written recommendations and high school transcripts. Such requirements take time to organize. For example with written recommendations, you should try to give at least three weeks advance notice, especially if you know that this person has other students asking for written recommendations as well. Although some high schools will send out transcripts one or two business days after a request, some may take longer especially if they need to send a hard copy versus sending the transcript electronically.
Pro Tip: The best recommendations come from people who have worked with you and understand your educational goals. For many students, these are teachers but others consider employers, coaches, church leaders or other community members.
5. Complete the Scholarship Requirements Accurately
After you put in all the effort, you want to ensure that your application does not get tossed because you met only 4 out of the 6 requirements. Ensure that you have included all your all the scholarship requirements by the deadline. If they ask for 500 words or less, use a word count. If they asked for a recommendation or transcript, this too was sent by the deadline. In addition, you want to resolve all spelling and grammar issues before the scholarship application is sent.
Colleen Krumwiede
Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer
Colleen MacDonald Krumwiede is a financial aid and paying for college expert with over a decade of financial aid experience at Stanford GSB, Caltech, and Pomona College and another decade at educational finance and technology companies servicing higher education. She guides go-to-market strategy and product development at Quatromoney to transform the way families afford college.
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