<p>All i ever here out of my counselors is that it is absolutely important to start on outside/private scholarships and that if anybody was expecting for scholarships to pay for school that they should have started yesterday.</p>
<p>I was given a myriad of websites... </p>
<p>Cappex
Fastweb...
etc ...</p>
<p>Is all it is going through those websites and doing every random scholarship that comes up?</p>
<p>or is there a better more organized way to do it.</p>
<p>Applying for outside scholarships is for the most part a waste of time - too many people, not too much money and usually only for one year.</p>
<p>What you should do is to find colleges, known for good institutional merit aid, where your scores and gpa put you in the top tier applicant pool. This way you can get merit-based scholarships from those colleges. </p>
<p>I also would encourage you to re-take ACT in September (after studying during summer). With this kind of GPA you probably can substantially increase your ACT score, which will open many doors for you.</p>
<p>If you want to go after private scholarships, look for local donors or donors who have a particular interest in an activity you’re already involved in. You’ll have a better shot that way.</p>
<p>I suggest applying for scholarships that are local, your county or school district size of an applicant pool is going to be a lot easier to get than a national scholarship, at least it was for me. Good luck!</p>
<p>Your counselors are VERY wrong. Unless you qualify for Gates scholarship (a large multi-year scholarship) or similar, applying to private scholarships is a waste of time since they don’t pay for college since those scholarships are often small and only for freshman year. So, you’d be short money for years 2, 3, and 4. </p>
<p>The BEST and most reliable scholarships are the ones given by COLLEGES for your stats. You need to retest (take both the ACT and SAT) to get the highest scores you can. </p>
<p>Also, by getting high scores, you’re more likely going to get accepted into schools that give the best scholarships.</p>
<p>That said, if you are a URM, look into the Gates scholarship.</p>
<p>I agree with all the posters above. My daughter just finished this process and we wasted WAY too much time on sites like Cappex and FastWeb. I really wish that I had found dodgersmom’s link a year ago when we started searching for colleges. Our GC never told us about guaranteed merit and we didn’t find out about it until it was much too late in the process for us. If I could do this all over again, I would forget completely about “outside scholarships” and focus only on the schools that offer generous merit aid.</p>
<p><em>waves</em> Hi, college financial aid administrator here. I’ve worked with some of my students to find out how to Google-search intelligently for private scholarships and apply for what they find. Here’s what we’ve found:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Google “______ community foundation”, putting in the name of your city or town for the . Do it again, putting in the name of your county instead of city or town. Do it a third time, putting in the name of your state instead of county. This set of search terms seems to be good at finding scholarships for students who live in your area.</p></li>
<li><p>Google " scholarship application PDF", putting in the name of your intended major for the ______. This only works if you’re pretty sure you want to major in that field, but of course you can keep doing it with different fields. This set of search terms seems to be good at taking you directly to the applications for scholarships, including the eligiblity requirements, so that you don’t get frustrated wading through a million web sites that make it hard to find their scholarship apps.</p></li>
<li><p>Keep in mind that any time a Google search turns up a scholarship for which you have to go to a web site ending in .edu, that’s almost certainly a scholarship that can be used <strong>only if you attend that school</strong>.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Other than that, the advice other folks have given above is really solid: The vast majority of scholarship aid DOES NOT come from this kind of search and application process. It comes from the schools you apply to. Focus on that.</p>
<p>You are smart to have figured out so early that the websites listed are usually a waste of time.</p>
<p>I signed up for FastWeb on behalf of my daughter and prepared a spreadsheet with each scholarship and its requirements. My D was well-rounded, with a 35 ACT, 4.0, NMSF at the time (later NMF), athletics, leadership, and community service. Most of the scholarships that came up in my search for her were ones that obviously didn’t apply to her. Some required demonstration of need, which would reduce her chances. At the end, she didn’t apply for any scholarships that we found solely through FAFSA.</p>
<p>She did apply for a local scholarship for her major, from which she received some money. We found out about it through her school.</p>
<p>In my opinion, steering students to FastWeb and similar sites is a method of abdicating any responsibility for helping students find scholarships. I think FastWeb just gathers your information for marketing purposes. I signed up my D using a short version of her name that we use only at home. She later got mail in that name.</p>
<p>In addition to the excellent suggestions above, you could search for scholarships by searching the web for publicly-available information posted by other high schools in your area.</p>
<p>I also agree with the person who suggested you might want to study over the summer to see whether you could increase your ACT score (or take the SAT). My children both raised their ACT scores the second time around. Taking the science section again was particularly beneficial, as they went from a 27 or 29 in one case, and a 30 in the other, to a 36 each in science. </p>