5 Types of College Scholarships Your Student Should Look For
ULoop recently published a summary of the 5 Types of Scholarships that students should look for. Here is the summary of each type:
1. Academic and Merit Scholarships
Academic scholarships have a variety of requirements; one may require a minimum GPA, while another will require a specific score on the SAT or ACT. These are typically offered by universities, so they are often easy to find through the university’s financial aid page or office. However, awards funded by they university or college often have deadlines for applicants, so your students should be sure to keep track of financial aid deadlines as to not miss out on free money.
Merit scholarships can be awarded because of academic, extracurricular (like student government/leadership), sport, and/or artistic performance. If your students is awarded a scholarship based on academic performance, they should be aware of the scholarship’s conditions, as some require that the student stays in good academic standing in order to qualify for the scholarship.
2. Major-based/Career-based Scholarships
Universities and colleges often offer scholarships to students based on their intended field of study. They can require a specific major or minor, but students can also qualify for many as long as their major lands in a specific school.
Along the same lines of scholarships for certain fields of study, you may also qualify for scholarships based on your future career, like the Tylenol Future Care scholarship for future medical professionals.
3. Community Service Scholarships
Whether your students complete community service because they wanted to, or if they were required to because of an extracurricular, their volunteered time can pay off in the form of scholarship awards.
Many scholarships have community service as one of their conditions, or sometimes only if it is funded by the organization your student volunteered for.
Regardless of if community service is a condition for the scholarship application, it’s a great thing to incorporate into an essay if your student learned something from their volunteered time.
4. Essay Scholarships
While those “1-click-and-apply” scholarships seem like the best option and the easiest option, do not overlook the scholarships that require a written submission. It may seem like a waste of time writing for something your student might not even get but thousands of other college students are probably thinking the same thought. The “1-click-and-apply” scholarships are the most attractive to students and are going to be the scholarships with the highest competition, and the essays that require more effort will have lower competition.
Most essay prompts will be based on personal experiences, such as “Write about a difficult time in your life and how you got yourself out of it.” Others will be responses to a supplied reading — usually a novel or article.
If your student is struggling with writing an essay, here are a few tips to guide them on making the perfect scholarship essay.
There’s a seemingly endless amount of scholarships and some qualifications aren’t exactly ones your student would put on their typical resume, like being tall, having asthma, etc. An example of one of the many scholarships that have strange qualifications is the Chick Evans Scholarship for Caddies, which requires applicants to have experience as a caddie.
Some great tips on each type of available scholarship from Uloop. Here is a link to their original article: https://www.uloop.com/news/view.php/226354/5-Types-of-Scholarships-to-Look-For
