Searching for scholarships

- Scholarships are a source of free money that students can use to help pay for college. So, obviously this is a great thing. And students can start looking for scholarships throughout their high school career. Most scholarships are available for students when they become seniors in high school, and then scholarships are available to students when they're in college as well. So scholarships are something that you should constantly be on the lookout for, and something that you will need to apply to. It might include filling out forms. It might mean writing essays. It might mean getting recommendation letters or submitting transcripts. Some of them are online. Some of them are paper applications. Your school might actually announce different scholarships through their newsletter or on their website, and so, it's something that you might need to be on the lookout for, you might have to pursue on your own. - I literally applied to every single scholarship I could ever think of. I googled every Armenian scholarship because I'm an Armenian descent, but I'm also from Lebanon, so I googled Lebanese scholarships, and the more I realized that the more specific you get on the scholarships end, the more likely you are to get it because not everyone applies to those scholarships, and I was really fortunate enough that I almost received every single scholarship I applied to because they were so specific to who I was, where I was from, and what I was going to be pursuing, and that saved me. - There's a number of scholarships out there, and sometimes it can be hard to figure out which ones you should apply to. I always encourage my students to apply to the local scholarships, so you should apply to the local scholarships. Those are the ones that might be limited to students in your school district, or to a certain number of high schools, or a certain region, and so you will have fewer students competing for those scholarships. So you might have a better shot of getting some of those scholarships. - Another great opportunity might be essay contests for scholarship dollars. They typically, again, require you to write some form of an essay, maybe anywhere from a page to five pages. Maybe also submit teacher recommendations, your SAT scores, even your transcripts. So, that extra amount of work sometimes deters students from doing that so if you're willing to put in that extra work, you'd be surprised to see how many extra scholarship dollars you may be able to get. - Some students go into the scholarship process thinking that scholarships are only for the students with the highest GPA or the highest test scores, and that's absolutely not true. Scholarships are for everyone, everyone who's willing to put in the work in order to apply for those scholarships.