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Find Scholarships in Your Own Backyard
Tweet Share on Facebook January 27, 2011 Comment (3)Launching your scholarship search via Google can be quite daunting—you'll end up with thousands of results, and most of them will be completely irrelevant to you. Last week, we shared with you some great online scholarship search engines that are extremely comprehensive but also allow you to focus your search on relevant awards. But there's another place to search for scholarship money that even these targeted search engines can miss—your own backyard.
This process will take a little more work than typing in a few search terms, but doing some extra digging for scholarships in your community will pay off if you're selected as a recipient. Plus, you'll feel extra warm and fuzzy receiving scholarship money from members of your own community who support your dream of achieving a college degree.
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Compare 5 Top Scholarship Search Engines
Tweet Share on Facebook January 20, 2011 Comment (14)There are so many free scholarship search engines available to students online—you'll get about 7 million results by Googling "scholarship search"—that it can be difficult to know which websites to use. It's a good idea to set up profiles on multiple sites so you catch as many opportunities as possible.
Which sites you choose is up to you, but in case you need some help with your decision making, I've looked at three key elements of several free search engines: how often their data is updated, whether they keep your information private, and what's unique about each of them.
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4 Hints to Avoid Missing Scholarship Deadlines
Tweet Share on Facebook January 13, 2011 Comment (2)There are plenty of things that can keep you up at night as you're working on scholarship and financial aid applications, but there might not be anything more nerve-wracking than deadlines. Virtually every scholarship has its own deadline, and it can seem like there's no rhyme or reason to when they fall—all of which makes keeping track of them turn into more work than applying. Fortunately, there are some good tools and useful rules of thumb that can help keep you on track:
1. The bigger the scholarship, the sooner you need to apply. Everyone knows the biggest names in the scholarship game: Coca-Cola Scholars, Best Buy, the Dell Foundation, Gates Millennium Scholarships, and their ilk. These are highly competitive scholarships with huge payoffs—and their deadlines are among the earliest that you'll run into, particularly during your senior year.
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7 Prestigious Undergrad Scholarships
Tweet Share on Facebook January 6, 2011 Comment (7)Yes, it's true that scholarships labeled "prestigious" usually have lengthy applications, require special projects, and are certainly more competitive than most. But if you're eligible for one of these scholarships, it definitely can't hurt to apply.
After all, someone has to win. If you're one of the lucky ones selected from hundreds or even thousands of students, not only will a large portion of your undergraduate tuition be covered, but you'll also gain an incredible amount of honor and opportunity from winning. And if you don't win, you still have a lot to gain by going through the application process.
