shape
carat
color
clarity

College search. Good resources for scholarships?

Upgradable

Ideal_Rock
Joined
Aug 15, 2004
Messages
5,537
Daughter is a high school senior, and we're in high gear researching colleges.

What we really need help with are good resources for scholarships. We're especially looking for those obscure ones that no one ever applies for, or that she's a shoe in to get. Unfortunaely, we do not fit into the "financial need" category, so those are out.

Any help or suggestions? She's a choir and musical theater nerd. Is planning on majoring in history, probably with an education degree. She'll be 5th generation teacher if she does. She has a sibling with a disability.
 

IdLikeToBuyAVal

Shiny_Rock
Joined
Apr 23, 2009
Messages
219
Fastweb.com. It's getting more and more filled with ads but it is an incredible resource. Your daughter (or you) can fill out her interests and potential major and it will give you a list of scholarships you can apply for. It's especially good for the larger/corporate/foundation scholarships and gives pretty detailed info on what you need to do to apply. Beware your email settings though, they will email you to death!

I also used Fastweb for my college search and it was helpful to identify schools I hadn't considered/thought about. I haven't searched for college info in a while but I used this extensively when I was in school.

Best of luck to you and your daughter!

Edited because I cannot think and type at the same time!
 

MissStepcut

Brilliant_Rock
Premium
Joined
Jun 29, 2011
Messages
1,723
I have to admit, I applied for dozens of those sorts of scholarships; did the apps, wrote the essays, the whole she-bang, and got nothing. It was a total waste of time. I wish I had, instead, applied to more colleges, applied to scholarships within those institutions, and tried to play colleges against each other to get a better aid deal. That's what I did for law school and I negotiated my way from full freight tuition to a $50k institutional scholarship.
 

JulieN

Super_Ideal_Rock
Premium
Joined
Jul 25, 2005
Messages
13,375
I'd probably wait until she got into college. The school should have a scholarship database.
 

ksinger

Ideal_Rock
Premium
Joined
Jan 30, 2008
Messages
5,083
A history teacher? What kind of goombah would actually want to be a history teacher??

;))

(I'll ask the hubs...)
 

Upgradable

Ideal_Rock
Joined
Aug 15, 2004
Messages
5,537
LOL ksinger!! It kind of blew me away too. She wants to major in history, especially european history. She decided she needed to tack on the Education portion to fund her excursions to Europe. Good thing, 'cause I ain't payin'!!!!
 

Indylady

Ideal_Rock
Joined
Apr 28, 2008
Messages
5,717
I'd go for institutional scholarships or state funded scholarships--I'd researched solely through university scholarship pages (each university will have one, and most times each department will have one as well) and only apply for those recommended scholarships. I wouldn't recommend larger data-base type scholarship searches. There are lots of ads and often outdated information also unfortunately, and it can be a large time sink trying to sift through the info.
 

artdecogirl

Brilliant_Rock
Joined
Sep 27, 2009
Messages
1,142
Hello Uppy, One place to look might be you, your husbands or grandparents places of employment, many corperations have
scholarships for family members of their employees. Good luck in your search!
 

OUpearlgirl

Ideal_Rock
Joined
Jun 26, 2007
Messages
3,081
A lot of the scholarships I received were based on my involvement in community service. I volunteered a lot throughout high school and it paid off.

Does your church offer scholarships?

I also suggest waiting until she gets accepted. Every school has a whole host of scholarships available to their students.
 

MissStepcut

Brilliant_Rock
Premium
Joined
Jun 29, 2011
Messages
1,723
I also recommend applying to more schools than she thinks she really wants to attend, so she can get a peek at the hypothetical aid package, all up and down the food chain. Expensive private schools often hand out generous merit-based aid if she has good grades and SAT/ACT scores. Also, while this might not apply to you, the top private schools might have more generous "need based" income requirements than you might think. Dartmouth, for example, will give out need-based aid up to $75k for annual household income.
 

pennquaker09

Brilliant_Rock
Joined
Nov 2, 2007
Messages
1,943
It kind of depends on where she is applying to college. I remember writing a lot of essays and things of that nature. Like, the Ayn Rand Foundation has a competition every year just based on reading those books. Not everyone can read them, but it can totally pay off.

If she's looking at public universities, some of the specific colleges have scholarships that have separate applications. And, assuming she will continue to do musical theatre in college, that is also money.

Of course, here's hoping she has amazing text scores. I know it sucks, but something like a 2300 SAT (or the equivalent ACT) would help.

And, again, it is all about picking the RIGHT school. Go on amazon and buy Loren Pope's Colleges That Change Lives.
 

fleur-de-lis

Brilliant_Rock
Joined
Apr 25, 2007
Messages
1,343
Have you asked at your daughter's school? There is typically at least one resource (teacher in charge of academic competition teams, debate coach, librarian, college counselor, etc.) who receives and maintains an ad hoc database of scholarship/essay competition opportunities. (In my h.s., it seemed like 90% of the kids had no idea that there was even a wall in a back corner of the library with 4x6 cards listing dozens of open-and-easy-to-win monies!)
 

MichelleCarmen

Super_Ideal_Rock
Joined
Feb 8, 2003
Messages
15,880
Upgradable|1316556673|3021645 said:
LOL ksinger!! It kind of blew me away too. She wants to major in history, especially european history. She decided she needed to tack on the Education portion to fund her excursions to Europe. Good thing, 'cause I ain't payin'!!!!
Someone I know decided to major in a form of European history. I won't say more b/c it's a bit out there. But, she ended up going to school IN europe and is saving a lot of $ that way. I guess she's paying a lot less there.
 

MichelleCarmen

Super_Ideal_Rock
Joined
Feb 8, 2003
Messages
15,880
artdecogirl|1316559074|3021688 said:
Hello Uppy, One place to look might be you, your husbands or grandparents places of employment, many corperations have
scholarships for family members of their employees. Good luck in your search!
Yes, excellent suggestion. My husband's co has this but the field has to be applicable to the same industry as his employer. They wouldn't fund a historian. (lol!)
 

luv2sparkle

Ideal_Rock
Premium
Joined
Feb 3, 2008
Messages
7,950
I don't have many suggestions because we tried all the normal avenues that give you a heads up on scholarships that are available
and we didn't get any of those. We did get offers from some of the schools that my son was accepted to. He was accepted to USC,
UCLA, Stanford, Pepperdine, and Point Loma U, as well as a few others. He ended up choosing UCLA, but the best offer he got was
from Point Loma. Had he chosen that school, the total cost would have been less than 7K per year. I couldn't force it on him though
because he had worked so hard all through high school and couldn't have possibly done any better, so we thought he earned his choice
even though it was much more expensive.

He did end up getting a scholarship from foundation that gives scholarships to children of police/firefighters and that was for 5k every
year (20k total) so that has helped.

Not getting any of the other scholarships Cody applied for was really disappointing and I didn't understand it frankly. His writing skills are excellent, he had lots of extra curricular activities, and over a 4.0 average and 4 years of AP classes. I would have thought
he would have been able to get a couple at least, but not one panned out. I guess for that reason, I don't have much confidence
in what you can get from those kind of scholarships.
 

MissStepcut

Brilliant_Rock
Premium
Joined
Jun 29, 2011
Messages
1,723
luv2sparkle|1316647035|3022491 said:
I don't have many suggestions because we tried all the normal avenues that give you a heads up on scholarships that are available
and we didn't get any of those. We did get offers from some of the schools that my son was accepted to. He was accepted to USC,
UCLA, Stanford, Pepperdine, and Point Loma U, as well as a few others. He ended up choosing UCLA, but the best offer he got was
from Point Loma. Had he chosen that school, the total cost would have been less than 7K per year. I couldn't force it on him though
because he had worked so hard all through high school and couldn't have possibly done any better, so we thought he earned his choice
even though it was much more expensive.

He did end up getting a scholarship from foundation that gives scholarships to children of police/firefighters and that was for 5k every
year (20k total) so that has helped.

Not getting any of the other scholarships Cody applied for was really disappointing and I didn't understand it frankly. His writing skills are excellent, he had lots of extra curricular activities, and over a 4.0 average and 4 years of AP classes. I would have thought
he would have been able to get a couple at least, but not one panned out. I guess for that reason, I don't have much confidence
in what you can get from those kind of scholarships.
I think there's a common mistaken belief that there's tons of free money out there, not being taken advantage of. I applied and applied (even for the Ayn Rand one mentioned ITT!) and came up totally empty-handed. Maybe at one time there were lots of scholarships that not enough people applied to, but I don't think that's the situation now.
 
Be a part of the community Get 3 HCA Results
Top