Or websites like fastweb.com? Where should I look for college scholarships?
Have I ever won anything on fastweb? No. And I don’t know anyone that has. The odds of you winning are incredibly slim, but not impossible. Slim as in, since it’s the internet, you’re going up against the whole entire internet community who might also be looking for scholarships, which if you think about it, could be hundreds of thousands of people in any of the fifty states of the US.
If you mean scholarships that fastweb lists, yes. If you mean scholarships fastweb personally gives out, no.
If you want a scholarship apply to colleges that give out scholarships. Spending time on places like Fastweb and Cappex is like walking around outside looking for $100 bills that someone may have left lying on the ground. Yes, you theoretically might find one if you spend enough hours searching. No, that’s not the best way to pay a $25,000 college tuition bill. This is especially tough since a lot of those scholarships are for very small amounts and/or are for one year only, which means that even if you win they might not help you that much.
Finding colleges that offer guaranteed merit scholarships for your grades, SAT scores, or other attributes is much more efficient and much more rewarding than spending time on those scholarship websites.
Applying to outside scholarships can be a great strategy, actually. But yes, the bulk of scholarship money tends to come from institutional merit aid.
“If you mean scholarships that fastweb lists, yes. If you mean scholarships fastweb personally gives out, no.”
Pretty much.
A lot of these scholarships can be reliable (though competitive) and provide some supplemental cash, such as STEM or ethnic scholarships, but you’ll need merit straight from the school to cover the big costs.
You have to balance the junk mail and mailing lists you’ll be added to vs the very slim benefits.
Some of the scholarships my D applied were also listed on Fastweb and she did win one of the them but not through the Fastweb link.
What are merit scholarships?
@Nuyorican
Exactly what they sound like, scholarships given for (usually) academic merit.
For example: having a high SAT/ACT score, being within a certain percentile of admitted students, stuff like that.
Anyhow, OP, I haven’t really heard of many people winning anything found on websites like fastweb. I have visited them myself, in the past, but I found the clusterbomb of random, and most likely very competitive, scholarships to be overwhelming. In the end, I just went to my guidance counselor. Ah, what little help he was.
You’re much better off looking for local, regional, or state-level scholarships. Many charitable organizations or civic foundations will give local scholarships (think Rotary, Junior League, Kiwanis, and so on). Your high school may have a list of these, or you can google to see if your state or county has a list. Or just google around for local scholarships. Bear in mind most of these awards will be for one year only.
As others have said, 4-year renewable scholarships from the college are your best bet for long-term planning.
Yes, those renewable scholarships from school is the best, however, every dollar counts even if they are not renewable. My D did apply to a handful of external scholarships and got one. Nevertheless, the school just reduce the grant by the exact amount. So one should find out if it does worth the effort or not as those small external scholarships can be easily buried by the need based aid and you gain nothing like us at the end.