College Planning content presented by The Sports Source

College Tips – Part 2

PAYING FOR COLLEGE & SCHOLARSHIPS

As you begin the important process of selecting a college, you and your parents will probably be influenced by the stated cost of each institution.  Please do not be! At least, not at first.

Too many students rule out a college that may be well suited to meet their needs because of that college's apparent high price. They assume that a student must be from a low-income family in order to qualify for financial aid.  They are unaware of student employment opportunities, creative payment plans, and low interest loans.  Some have not turned over enough stones in search of competitive scholarships and restricted grants.  Others are simply bewildered by the perceived complexities of the financial aid application process.  Did you know that by obtaining a teaching certificate and advising the college that you intend to “teach school” in some cases your student loans can and will be forgiven?  There are so many obscure scholarships anyone can apply for – for example Scholarships for left-handed people, the Society for Chicanos and Native Americans and many more, if you do your homework. 

For minority students in particular, scholarships and fellowships that help fund graduate education abound, and you don’t necessarily have to be a straight-A student to qualify. Many scholarships require GPAs of only 2.5 (a few even lower), some offer paid internships with companies as part of the package, and some are need-based or specific to a particular major or even a particular state.

DECIPHER THOSE ACRONYMS
Although it can feel a bit like wading through a bowl of alphabet soup, recognizing the acronyms of relevant professional organizations is a first step in chasing down cash. Professional organizations including SWE (Society of Women Engineers), SHPE (Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers), (WEPAN) Women in Engineering Programs and Advocates Network, NSBE (National Society of Black Engineers) and NACME (National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering) provide opportunities for both career and educational advancement. Such organizations charge themselves with the mission of advancing underrepresented groups within engineering fields, and sponsorship of graduate scholarships helps them to achieve this mission. By investing in your educational future, professional societies bank on your continued success.

Many students, perhaps prideful about their independence and their ability to hoist themselves up by their own bootstraps, hesitate to turn to a school’s diversity officer (or, say, the director of a minority engineering program) for help when it comes to funding. Some assume that the officer’s job is over once the student has enrolled in school, but the opposite is true. My experience in talking with such officers is that they are highly informed, tightly networked and always eager to help minority students cash in on opportunities even beyond graduation.

Students are often “shy about asking for help,” especially if they’re approaching their senior year and have not received scholarship money before. They assume, since they received little or no funding in the past, that there’s little point in seeking it now. However, as you enter your senior year or lock your sights on graduate school, new sources of funding emerge, especially for those who have proven themselves academically. Frequently, diversity officers have scholarship money—especially money that could help fund your senior year—that goes untapped.

Another reason to work with your school’s diversity officer is that you can get the inside track on specific expectations that accompany a scholarship or fellowship. Some fellowships carry with them unwritten expectations. Often they expect recipients to do such things as attend awards dinners and mix with faculty, or expect the student to remain professionally active through particular conferences or society membership.

Many graduate scholarships include a commitment for you to work in the summer at a particular company—an opportunity that many students welcome, but one that could also help you choose against a scholarship because that company does not interest you. As with the school you choose for your graduate degree, you want to ensure the best fit.

Finally, remember that you have several different human resource persons to turn to when you apply for a scholarship: those from your undergraduate school, those from your intended graduate program and those administering the scholarship. It pays to turn to all of these sources for help.

Applying for scholarship money is serious business, and your first glimpse of the application form should confirm that you cannot do the job in a hurry. Pay attention to every minute detail to be certain you are not passed over or made less competitive for reasons you could have avoided.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), cites incomplete applications as the number one factor in some scholarship candidates being assessed below others. In the case of the GRFP, some students turn in an application without a transcript or with fewer than four letters of reference, thus greatly diminishing their chances of winning a scholarship.

For the Microsoft Scholarship, you must provide a resume listing your computer languages in descending order of skill. These kinds of stipulations help the award judges achieve built-in selectivity, elevate the professionalism of the process and mandate that the best candidates will follow application instructions to the letter.

A more advanced strategy, once you have identified a desired scholarship, is to apply the same principle you would in a cover letter: Do your homework about the opportunity and showcase that homework in your application. Effective scholarship applications, especially when they involve substantive essays, are well-informed about the scholarship, the sponsoring company, organization or institution, and perhaps even about former scholarship recipients. Most scholarship Web pages, proud to publicize the award’s history or profile its past winners, provide links that you can follow to gain knowledge on these topics. The savvy student who finds ways to use such knowledge in an application essay shows that he or she aims to bring increased honor to the award and to those already affiliated with it.

One caveat, though, when surfing for scholarship information on the Web: don’t pay for it. Just as there are companies in cyberspace eager to post your resume to potential employers for a price, there are plenty of dot-com’s out there trying to make money off of those seeking money. As you surf, you may find pages—typically unaffiliated with an established scholarship or organization—requiring you to register or pay directly for scholarship information. We want to caution students that they should “never pay for scholarship information.”

Many students make the mistake of taking far too narrow a view when it comes to scholarship money. “They look at a scholarship award of say, $1,000 or $2,000, and they figure Ô’Why bother going after it?’ What they don’t realize is that they might combine that scholarship award with another one.”

Recognize that even in scholarship awards that are large, a typical breakdown of funds reserves a certain amount of money for books and living expenses and another amount for tuition. You can apply this same strategy to your search, using one source of funding for one purpose and a second source for another.

Always encourage students to seek local or community based-funding like the Kiwanis, Knights of Columbus, local stores, national stores/retailers, Booster Clubs, local churches, etc.,” Be creative in your thinking about how money might be obtained and used, and don’t look on a comparatively small sum as being beneath your efforts.  American General Scholarship earmarked for “Students With Good Hearts, Johnson & Johnson offers scholarships for those who are interested in the medical field and Target Department Stores also offers a scholarship program.  You may be surprised to learn that many of the various food companies you purchase product from also offers scholarships – so check your food pantry and then look at those companies on the web you just might be surprised.