How to Improve your Chances of Winning a Scholarship – Part One

This is the beginning of a four-part series all designed to help you increase your chances of winning a scholarship. You find a breif overview of each section in this post. If you’re a forward-thinking high school student interested in winning scholarships, be sure to check this series of posts out as they should vastly improve your chances of earning some aid!

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So you’re in high school and you have your sights on college. Besides which institution you’ll attend and which major you’ll pursue, it’s a good idea to start planning ahead on how you’re going to pay for this last leg of your educational journey. Scholarships are always available and should constantly be sought after as the cost of a college education steadily increases year after year. In fact, it’s widely known that tuition rises double the rate of inflation so the earlier you start the better. This four-part series is all aimed at helping high school students accomplish that goal. You’ll learn valuable principles that should help steer you in the right direction and hopefully motivate you in your quest for financial aid. This first part is just here to give you a brief overview of each upcoming section designed to propel you to the front of the line. It’s good to start the scholarship hunt as early as you can (there are scholarship opportunities all throughout K-12), yet this series is aimed at those in high school. Here’s a quick rundown of each section:

Extra-Curricular Activities

We all know that extra-curricular activities are important, right? Well, this section will list easy outside-the-classroom programs offering awards and accomplishments you can list on future scholarship applications. Some allow you to clearly map out and guide you in any extra-curricular activities you plan on performing while others simply award you for the work you’ve already done. These are all easy programs that you can get into and are open to students across the nation. All you have to do is sign-up. Each program will increase your chances of winning future scholarships while a few offer scholarships themselves. Getting involved with each one will help catapult you to the front of the line.

Organization

This section will offer help on how to organize your scholarship search. If you want to get more done, it’s important you setup a way that’ll minimize mistakes and allow you to increase output. Detailed in this post are a few ways you can go about organizing your scholarship search that range from technology to old-fashion. Of course, you can always think outside the box and come up with your own ways of organizing. This section is only meant to help jumpstart the process at coming up with your own methods, but also has methods you can try. The bottomline is that you apply for as many scholarships as possible in an orderly fashion as that will make a huge difference. And if interested in pursuing scholarships for the long-haul, you’ll need an efficient method that’ll help streamline the process for you. This part of the series will offer you those tips and give you advice on how you can best do that.

Where to Look

One of the most common questions is where should I start looking for scholarships? Beyond scholarship matchmaking sites, there are plenty of other sources that offer pertinent information on scholarship programs. Part four of this series will detail the many areas from which aid can be found. There are various types of scholarships out there, and to increase your chances of winning aid, you’ll want to mix it up a bit by pursuing programs from different areas. This will be the last section of the series, after which, you should be primed and ready to begin your quest for financial aid.