How to Get Scholarships

College is expensive. With tuition becoming more expensive each year, it is vital that you do all that you can to get as many scholarships as possible…

Here are a few tips:

– Apply, apply, apply! Beginning with the first day of your senior year of high school, apply for one new scholarship every day. More often than not, winning a scholarship is luck of the draw. The more often you apply the more likely you are to win.

– Never pay. Avoid scholarships that have an application fee, unless you are feeling lucky.

– Plagiarize yourself. Save any “essays” you are required to write. Most of these can be reworded or copied exactly.

– Squeeze yourself dry. Whether it be because of your ethnicity, pitcher plant collection, or the fact that you are a firm believer in Scientology, there is probably a scholarship for it. Don’t quit searching until you find one.

– Don’t worry about missing deadlines. If you are worrying about deadlines, then you aren’t applying often enough. By doing ONE application per day, starting with the most pressing first, you will never be forced to spend an entire week filling out a hundred web-forms.

– Cleverly choose your major. Many scholarships require that you “plan to pursue the greater good within the field of business” or “put glitter on everybody’s books with library science” or…well, you get the picture. If you aren’t really sure what major you want to pick, use this to your advantage. If you run across 15 scholarship applications which require that you plan to pursue a certain field, then major in that your first year. Take general courses only and you won’t even fall behind! If (and when) you make all A’s, you’ll be a top-tier college student. Change your major to what you actually want, apply with your 4.0, and there you go.

– Start a club or athletic group and make yourself the president. All scholarship committees love hearing about leadership experiences. If you are near the end of your high school career and find that all of your applications are lacking this vital component, maybe it is time to see how many people you can get interested in curling.