Financing Your Education

Its the start of a new year, and time to get serious about financing your education past high school. Whether you are planning to attend a junior college, university, or technical school, you should start applying for scholarships from several sources. First, start with your high school's guidance office. Many schools compile a list of community scholarships for seniors. This saves you the time and energy of hunting down local funding sources. Get a head start on the competition by talking to teachers and mentors about their willingness to write a recommendation letter for you. Too many students wait until the last week to ask a teacher, counselor, or other adult to write a recommendation letter. Second, check out the institutional scholarships from the school you plan to attend. Apply for as many of those that you qualify for. Third, search out private scholarships. Use your school's guidance center or the public library to find scholarship sources. Finally, be sure to fill out the FAFSA form early. More families will be filing a FAFSA this year, so don't delay completing this important task. You should have your PIN all ready so you can electronically file the form. Visit the last post to find out more about a PIN. Many bright, competent students miss out on scholarships and grants simply because they do not apply on time or have incomplete applications. Keeping track of scholarship deadlines is essential. Stay on track to meet your college and career goals.

POST your tips for finding and securing scholarships and grants.

Next blog: Creating an academic resume

Start working on scholarship applications now

For many students, this is the time of year when they start to think about upcoming semester finals and the much anticipated winter break. But for high school seniors now is the time to start working on scholarship applications. By now many seniors have made the decision of where to attend college or have narrowed their choices to one or two schools, and they have some idea of what they want to declare as a major. So now the focus should shift to applying for scholarships. There is a mass of scholarships available, but it takes time and effort to:

*find scholarships that match your accomplishments, interests, and experiences
*write a winning essay
*obtain recommendation letters from teachers, coaches, mentors
*compile and submit other needed documentation
*obtain a copy of your high school transcript

So don’t put off starting the scholarship search any longer. It is devastating to find a scholarship that’s a perfect match for you only to find that you don’t have time to gather all of the needed documentation to apply before the deadline or that the deadline has all ready passed.

So start NOW!

And those of you who are juniors, start finding the scholarships which fit you now so that next summer you can start early working on those college essays.

Happy writing!