or fastweb or any of the other online scholarship info aggregators? Say $2,000 or more?
For S1 we eventually gave up as it was hard to tell which scholarships were just trolling
for database creation and which were legitimate scholarships. Hard to tell which would be
fairly judged and meted out and what the odds were. And each application took time to
write an essay and there was so much going on. I have two more boys coming up through
high school. I wondered if anyone had a particularly good or bad experience with these
sites. Often they seemed a bit shady to me as they’d suggest scholarships via email
that obviously didn’t match the criteria we’d entered months earlier. But if there people
who felt these sites were helpful I’d like to hear the stories.
Would also be interested
Yes. Pretty much all the scholarships I received are listed on fastweb/zinch/etc. Problem is, you can’t rely on their filters. You should sort by upcoming deadlines and go through them yourself (or, at least, that’s what I did).
@CourtneyThurston Congratulations on your scholarships! Were there any in particular you’d recommend as worthwhile pursuing? My middle boy is looking at going after a bio or pre-med track in college.
Depends on the scholarship, really. Avoiding outside scholarships altogether is something many people do, and for good reason – in my mind, it’s really an “apply for everything and expect nothing” situation. Winning scholarships is sort of like getting struck by lightning – but there’s a lot you can do to get yourself struck by lightning. Same thing applies: depending on the scholarship, you can maximize your chances if you understand what the committee is looking for.
But, like I said, it depends pretty heavily on each scholarship’s criteria. Coca-Cola places a huge emphasis on community service (the average this year was ~1200 hours per scholar) that isn’t present so much in other programs. The good thing is, most major national programs are managed & awarded by either Scholarship America/Scholarship Management Services or ISTS, so you’re dealing with the same kind of application template/criteria almost all the time.
So, in short, it’s probably a matter of where your kid is strong.