Guide to the Internet for Scholarship Seekers
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One more time, all together now, “Thank you for the internet!”. The internet saves enormous time and expense by allowing you to access websites specifically designed to help scholarship seekers, visit scholarship websites to learn more about the judging, and, in some cases, apply for scholarships on-line. Not surprisingly, the Internet also presents a number of opportunities to spend money without result. This page discusses the good, the bad and the ugly on the web.
Scholarship Websites
Absolutely Scholarships
www.absolutelyscholarships.com
data base of more than 200,000 awards. Features its own $10,000 scholarship
BrokeScholar
www.brokescholar.com
more than 900,000 scholarships worth over $3 billion. Personalized calendar and keyword search; helpful
College Board
http://apps.collegeboard.com
2,300 sources of college funding, totaling nearly $3 BILLION in available
Collegenet/Mach 25
www.collegenet.com
The Mach25 database contains over 600,000 awards totaling over $1.6 billion. Allows key word search; nice feature
College Scholarships
www.CollegeScholarships.Com
Groups scholarship by interest; includes middle school and high school awards
Collegeview
www.collegeview.com
This site provides a scholarship directory so you can brows as well as search; a nice feature. Very good financial aid explanations.
Club Scholarship
www.Clubscholarship.com
Part of the Collegiatefunding.com network, and lists more than 500,000 awards.
EduPrep
www.eduprep.com
Maintains a data base of more than 2.5 million awards; offers an essay writing course.
GoCollege
www.gocollege.com
600,000 scholarships from more than 8,000 funding sources; includes info on distance learning
Hispanic Scholarships
www.HispanicScholarship.com
data base of scholarships for Hispanic students.
International Education Financial Aid
www.iefa.org
Specializes in scholarships for international students and study abroad.
International Scholarships
www.internationalscholarships.com
International scholarship listings
Military
http://www.military.com/Education/ScholarShip/newsearch
Scholarships specific to current and former military personnel.
Nationally Coveted Scholarships and Fellowships
www.scholarships.kachinatech.com
Limited undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral awards.
Pacific Northwest Scholarship Guide
http://fp2.adhost.com/collegeplan/scholarship/default.asp
Search by category or key word
Scholarships101
www.scholarships101.com
Data base containing more than 600,000 awards; fascinating story about a committed guidance counselor; worth a look
Scholarships.Com
www.scholarship.com
Looks like there’s good info on site. Must register to access.
SRN Express
www.srnexpress.com
A database of over 8,000 programs with a distribution level of over 150,000 awards for undergraduate and postgraduate students worth a total of more than $35 million!
StudentAwards
www.studentawards.com
U.S. and Canadian scholarship data bases.
The Scholarship Page
www.scholarshippage.com
Small search capability
WiredScholar/SallieMae
www.wiredscholar.com
over 2.4 million scholarships worth over 14 billion dollars, and is expanded and updated daily. Provided by SallieMae, federal loan group
How many of these sites should you use? You can be obsessive and try to use them all. A more reasonable alternative might be to pick five or six that seem most suitable and go for it.
Key Word Searches
Go back to your personal assessment and select interests, hobbies, types of community service. Now, using a search engine such as Google, enter the interest and the word “scholarship”. We entered “chess and scholarship in MSN search and got over 8,000 hits. One site,listed 22 chess scholarships. We tried “girl scouts and scholarship” in Google and got 43,000 hits, starting with www.jfg.girlscouts.org, that listed 50 girl scout scholarship sources. We even found scholarships for spelunking (that’s cave exploration for those of you who haven’t been studying your SAT word lists!).
On-line Scams
Be oh so careful when searching for scholarships on-line. As in every area of the internet, schemes for fleecing people have developed in the scholarship arena. The typical scams involve application fees, “guarantees”, fees for publicly available money and requests for an unusual amount of personal information.
Paid Searches
Usually paid searches suggest that they have access to otherwise unlisted scholarships. This scenario is very unlikely. Considering the tremendous availability of free databases, there is no good reason to pay for scholarship information.
“Guarantees”
Guarantees of any kind are a huge red flag. It just isn’t possible for an organization to make guarantees about winning an award and those who guarantee matches are hyping their services; legitmate scholarship search sites do not need to rely on BIG PRINT and lots of exclamation points!!!!! And possibly bolding and underlining to describe their services.
Application Fees
Beware of any scholarship fund that requests a fee. We have heard of funds that essentially turn the fees into scholarships and if so, terrific. But, be sure that the ratio of scholarships to money collected is reasonable. If you can’t get that level of information from their website, it’s not worth the key strokes to get involved.
Contact Information
Legitimate businesses will list methods for contacting them beyond and e-mail address and PO Box. If you can’t talk to them, they may not exist as a real business.
The FTC has developed several excellent publication s on the issue of scholarship scams. Students Getting Stung Trying to Find $$$ for College” .
Essay Writing and Editing Services
We encourage you to get coaching and editing assistance on your essays. It’s almost always useful for someone else to review your work and provide fresh insights.
There are services available on the internet that will edit your essay for you for a fee. Editing is good; re-writing is not. We have concerns that some “editing” groups are really re-writing students’ essays based on just a core idea or two. The point of the essay is for the judges to get to know you, not some freelancer who’s picking up $50 to massage your thoughts for you.
When we asked judges about the practice of students having their essays written or substantially written for them, we were told that those essays tend to stick out because they are out of character with the rest of the application. We can pretty comfortably speculate on the fate of those “diverging style and competence” applications. Flushed.
Students are often looking for freelance writers to compose essays and college applications (and term papers and graduate theses). It’s very sad to realize that those people are managing their lives by lying and cheating. Makes you wonder how they’ll operate once they become doctors and lawyers and architects and engineers and the pressure to perform and produce gets intense. Fall back on old habits?
Essay assistance can be an excellent learning tool if done well. The internet can put you in touch with people who can coach you through writing your essay. Just be sure that at the end of the day, you can still honestly call it your own work.
Scholarship Websites
Absolutely Scholarships
www.absolutelyscholarships.com
data base of more than 200,000 awards. Features its own $10,000 scholarship
BrokeScholar
www.brokescholar.com
more than 900,000 scholarships worth over $3 billion. Personalized calendar and keyword search; helpful
College Board
http://apps.collegeboard.com
2,300 sources of college funding, totaling nearly $3 BILLION in available
Collegenet/Mach 25
www.collegenet.com
The Mach25 database contains over 600,000 awards totaling over $1.6 billion. Allows key word search; nice feature
College Scholarships
www.CollegeScholarships.Com
Groups scholarship by interest; includes middle school and high school awards
Collegeview
www.collegeview.com
This site provides a scholarship directory so you can brows as well as search; a nice feature. Very good financial aid explanations.
Club Scholarship
www.Clubscholarship.com
Part of the Collegiatefunding.com network, and lists more than 500,000 awards.
EduPrep
www.eduprep.com
Maintains a data base of more than 2.5 million awards; offers an essay writing course.
GoCollege
www.gocollege.com
600,000 scholarships from more than 8,000 funding sources; includes info on distance learning
Hispanic Scholarships
www.HispanicScholarship.com
data base of scholarships for Hispanic students.
International Education Financial Aid
www.iefa.org
Specializes in scholarships for international students and study abroad.
International Scholarships
www.internationalscholarships.com
International scholarship listings
Military
http://www.military.com/Education/ScholarShip/newsearch
Scholarships specific to current and former military personnel.
Nationally Coveted Scholarships and Fellowships
www.scholarships.kachinatech.com
Limited undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral awards.
Pacific Northwest Scholarship Guide
http://fp2.adhost.com/collegeplan/scholarship/default.asp
Search by category or key word
Scholarships101
www.scholarships101.com
Data base containing more than 600,000 awards; fascinating story about a committed guidance counselor; worth a look
Scholarships.Com
www.scholarship.com
Looks like there’s good info on site. Must register to access.
SRN Express
www.srnexpress.com
A database of over 8,000 programs with a distribution level of over 150,000 awards for undergraduate and postgraduate students worth a total of more than $35 million!
StudentAwards
www.studentawards.com
U.S. and Canadian scholarship data bases.
The Scholarship Page
www.scholarshippage.com
Small search capability
WiredScholar/SallieMae
www.wiredscholar.com
over 2.4 million scholarships worth over 14 billion dollars, and is expanded and updated daily. Provided by SallieMae, federal loan group
How many of these sites should you use? You can be obsessive and try to use them all. A more reasonable alternative might be to pick five or six that seem most suitable and go for it.
Key Word Searches
Go back to your personal assessment and select interests, hobbies, types of community service. Now, using a search engine such as Google, enter the interest and the word “scholarship”. We entered “chess and scholarship in MSN search and got over 8,000 hits. One site,listed 22 chess scholarships. We tried “girl scouts and scholarship” in Google and got 43,000 hits, starting with www.jfg.girlscouts.org, that listed 50 girl scout scholarship sources. We even found scholarships for spelunking (that’s cave exploration for those of you who haven’t been studying your SAT word lists!).
On-line Scams
Be oh so careful when searching for scholarships on-line. As in every area of the internet, schemes for fleecing people have developed in the scholarship arena. The typical scams involve application fees, “guarantees”, fees for publicly available money and requests for an unusual amount of personal information.
Paid Searches
Usually paid searches suggest that they have access to otherwise unlisted scholarships. This scenario is very unlikely. Considering the tremendous availability of free databases, there is no good reason to pay for scholarship information.
“Guarantees”
Guarantees of any kind are a huge red flag. It just isn’t possible for an organization to make guarantees about winning an award and those who guarantee matches are hyping their services; legitmate scholarship search sites do not need to rely on BIG PRINT and lots of exclamation points!!!!! And possibly bolding and underlining to describe their services.
Application Fees
Beware of any scholarship fund that requests a fee. We have heard of funds that essentially turn the fees into scholarships and if so, terrific. But, be sure that the ratio of scholarships to money collected is reasonable. If you can’t get that level of information from their website, it’s not worth the key strokes to get involved.
Contact Information
Legitimate businesses will list methods for contacting them beyond and e-mail address and PO Box. If you can’t talk to them, they may not exist as a real business.
The FTC has developed several excellent publication s on the issue of scholarship scams. Students Getting Stung Trying to Find $$$ for College” .
Essay Writing and Editing Services
We encourage you to get coaching and editing assistance on your essays. It’s almost always useful for someone else to review your work and provide fresh insights.
There are services available on the internet that will edit your essay for you for a fee. Editing is good; re-writing is not. We have concerns that some “editing” groups are really re-writing students’ essays based on just a core idea or two. The point of the essay is for the judges to get to know you, not some freelancer who’s picking up $50 to massage your thoughts for you.
When we asked judges about the practice of students having their essays written or substantially written for them, we were told that those essays tend to stick out because they are out of character with the rest of the application. We can pretty comfortably speculate on the fate of those “diverging style and competence” applications. Flushed.
Students are often looking for freelance writers to compose essays and college applications (and term papers and graduate theses). It’s very sad to realize that those people are managing their lives by lying and cheating. Makes you wonder how they’ll operate once they become doctors and lawyers and architects and engineers and the pressure to perform and produce gets intense. Fall back on old habits?
Essay assistance can be an excellent learning tool if done well. The internet can put you in touch with people who can coach you through writing your essay. Just be sure that at the end of the day, you can still honestly call it your own work.