What is the best site to find scholarship?
When you’re looking to find scholarships it can be really difficult especially if you’re looking for smaller scholarships. Some of the best scholarships websites are: Bigfuture.collegeboard.org Fastweb.com scholarships.com Unigo.com Nice.com Cappex.com Those websites can be useful. However, they are riddled with ads and they mainly have sweepstakes and different ad scholarships. Like you’re just signing up for their mailing list and you’re not really applying based on any kind of merit. I’ve never met somebody who’s won one of those sweepstake scholarships so look for the actual legitimate scholarships that have an application process. Sometimes a simple Google search in google.com is really your best friend to find scholarships. I would highly recommend searching “wherever you’re from then scholarship” or “whatever you’re interested in then scholarship” and make sure you have undergrad there in your search because sometimes you’ll get grad school scholarships (scholarships you’re not necessarily eligible for). Google is the best website to find scholarships and those websites are also good sometimes.
The different types of scholarships
Scholarships can be divided into 3 categories- Institutional scholarships – these come from the school themselves. They can be both merit and need-based. Some schools offer both or only one of those types of aid. Merit-based aid means aid that is awarded to you for academic and/or extracurricular achievement. Specific things to watch out for is if your colleges meet 100% of need and if they meet 100% of need without loans. Some schools they’ll say like they’ll cover 100% of your demonstrated need but they’ll add in about 6,000 dollars of loans which is much different than a school that will cover 100% of need and zero loans so be sure to watch out for the schools on your list that do that, schools that offer merit and schools that offer need-based scholarships.
- Major national scholarships – Major national scholarships are really hard to get. One example of one is the Coca-Cola Scholarship. About 93,000 people apply and only 150 are selected every year to win the scholarship. Major national scholarships can be divided into some categories as well. The first one is merit-only-based scholarships. Those are ones like Coca Cola which don’t take into account income or background when evaluating your application. The next one would be need plus merit which means they’re looking at your family background, your access to resources, as well as your academics and other merits. These major national scholarships tend to offer a lot more money than the next category which is:
- Local/regional scholarships – These are typically smaller sums of money and they come from local organizations such as the Lions Clubs and Elks Clubs, and Kiwanis.
- Demographic-based + merit scholarships – Demographic as in ethnicity, as in intended major, but it’s based on fitting a certain criteria background plus merit as well.
