Applying for College Scholarships

Shawn Morrissey: Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this evening for our webinar, applying for college scholarships.

My name is Sean Morrissey. I'm the director of college relations. I've been with MIFA for about six months now, but before I joined MIFA, I have about 30 years of experience working in financial aid. Um, and I want to thank you for joining us. I'm going to go through the presentation, but let you know that the chat is disabled this evening.

If you do have questions, you can answer, you can enter those in the Q and A section and we do have, um, Stephanie and Jennifer also from MIFA here that will help answer the questions in the question and answer section for you as we're going through. And I also have a question and answer section at the end if you want to ask some questions live as well.

We are recording this webinar and we will send you a link to the presentation. Um, for the next couple of days, so a little bit about we found, we are a state authority created by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1982. And we help families plan, save and pay for college. We hope that you will sign up for our emails.

Look for us on social media at the end of the presentation. I'm going to have links to all our social media accounts and also look at our website to find other webinars that we have available that we have live ones that you can sign up for. We also have recorded webinars that you can watch on our website and on YouTube as well.

So the topics we're going to cover tonight are what are scholarships, where to look for scholarships. Some online search engines for you to use to look for scholarships, tips to finding scholarships, and also how scholarships, um, interact with the rest of the financial aid package. So first of all, what are scholarships?

Um, scholarships are funds that are used to pay for college that students don't need to pay back. Most of the time scholarships are, are in recognition of attributes that a student will have, or things that they've achieved, such as good grades, um, sports, community service, leadership, leadership activities.

There are other scholarships out there that, um, are based on essay contests or just for donors that want to give funding to people from certain groups or have certain interests, um, so there are all different types of scholarships out there. Um, the good news about scholarships is they don't need to be repaid.

So they are very helpful in helping to pay a college education. Um, they are provided. By all kinds of sources, community organizations, foundations, nonprofits, corporations, colleges can set that up. Individuals have scholarships set up as well. And they really are a great help in helping to cover college costs.

I have to say, as a first generation student going to college, I wouldn't have been able to go to college without scholarship support. I was very lucky to find a scholarship in my local community. That gave me 7, 000 a year towards my college education, which is a lot of money now, but back when I went to college was really A big portion of what my college expenses were, and I'm so thankful for the opportunity that that scholarship game.

So, um, a little few key facts about scholarships, um, the typical high school senior where you're going through this process and going through online searches, which will go on later about where you can go to search for those scholarships. And once you put in criteria about yourself. The average high school senior matches with about 50 to 100 scholarships nationwide in the search engines.

So, we'll talk about how you can maximize the number of scholarships that you do match with. Narrow down which of those scholarships you want to spend your time applying for. If you don't want to apply for all of those, although you can maximize. Your options, if you do apply for more scholarships. About half of, um, athletic scholarships are designated for one of four sports, football, basketball, soccer, and track and field.

I mean, we do have a great webinar, Athletics in College Admissions, that talks a lot about, um, athletic scholarships and how those work. Athletic scholarships, for the most part, are given by the college or university that the student is applying to. So, um, that is often a different Trap to go through to apply for a scholarship than the ones that we are talking about tonight.

So, each year, there's about 100 and 1, 000, 000 dollars in unclaimed scholarships in the US, which. Um, it's really quite surprising when you think about all of the students that are looking for money to help them go to scholarships. And the reason for that. Is some of them just aren't able to find qualified applicants for it, or students that meet.

The criteria they're looking for. Um, to match with their scholarships. So scholarships have set up for all different types of groups, interests. So really when you're searching for a scholarship, you should put in to the search engine, as much information as you can about yourself, um, in your interest to help match with scholarships.

You'd be surprised the things that they give. scholarships for. There are scholarships for people who enjoy knitting, for people who want to find a way to help, um, crops in the potato industry. So there are all kinds of unusual scholarships out there that have a hard time finding qualified applicants. So if you have an unusual, um, interest, hobby, Please enter that into the search and you should not be surprised and find some help money to help you with college.

Even if it's not something that you're planning to use when you're studying or going to, um, the university. It doesn't always have to line up that what you're studying in the university and the scholarship that you're, you're going to be applying to.

So here are some things to help you get started in your search. Um, first of all, what areas are you looking to, to study? There are a lot of scholarships set up to help you, um, with your future career. For example, if you're going into science, math areas, there are really a lot of scholarships in the STEM areas.

If you're going into nursing, if you're going into business, there are all kinds of scholarships set up for future careers to help you, um, succeed. In your college career for that. So look at what you're trying to study that that might be 1 area that scholarship searches. You can put it in the information where have you volunteered if you've done any volunteering work.

Look into that and see if where you volunteered, if they offer any scholarship programs, because oftentimes if you're volunteering somewhere, they also may have a scholarship opportunity, or there may be, um, some other scholarships that are geared towards students who have done some volunteering and will, you can match with those as well.

What are the various cultural backgrounds in your family heritage? Do you have special talents? Is, do you or anyone in your family with a disability or health challenge? All of these things are criteria that you can put in the search engines when you're searching for scholarships that may help you, um, find a match.

Have any of your parents or grandparents served in the military? Where do your parents work? Sometimes the parent's employer may have a scholarship opportunity for you. Um, or if your parents are working for a company that has a parent company that's bigger than that, they may have some scholarships as well.

Also, where do you work? More and more often now employers are giving out scholarships to their employees to help them further their education. So that's often a great place to start as well to see if your employer has any type of scholarships available. So where do you look for scholarships? The first place to look is the high school guidance office.

And this really is the, I would say, the most important place to start with this. Because you're going to be competing with the smallest pool of students for the scholarships through your high school guidance office. They're going to have all the local scholarships that attract a small pool of applicants.

Some of them may only be available to students in your high school. So please go to your high school guidance office and find out what the scholarship opportunities they have there. They usually have a list of the scholarships that are available with criteria about the scholarship. So what are the scholarships looking for, um, in an applicant?

So please apply for all of those that are, that, um, are applicable to you and that you meet those criteria. Um, if your school has A college planning portal, such as the MIFA Pathway or Naviance, those scholarships are often listed in that portal. So please take advantage of that and look at the scholarships available at your local high school guidance office, because you're competing against a much smaller pool of students for these scholarships, you're much more likely to be chosen for it than if you're going after a national scholarship that will have a national pool of applicants.

Also, again, check out work. Um, parents place of work may have private scholarships dedicated to children, the employees, um, or again, if you have a summer part time job. Sometimes those employers will have scholarships available to help further the education of their employees. Also, um, you are involved in any professional associations, or if there are professional associations that are, um, aligned with your career that you're going to be studying, please check into those.

They might have scholarships to help you out. Again, if you're going into To science, um, math, the STEM areas, those are really, there are a lot of scholarships that are geared towards students in those areas. Um, if you're going into nursing, any, any type of. Career like that, we'll get the professional associations related to that in the local professional associations.

If you have local organizations. Um, if you have Elks Rotary Clubs, PTA organizations, they may have scholarships as well. Check the local organizations that have websites, um, locally to help you out with that. And online search engines, we're going to be going through several reputable websites to help you with your online, um, search process.

In there, you can filter by specific criteria here. These are usually national databases that have scholarship opportunities. Um, to make the most out of these, create an account with each of the different tools that we're going to talk about later. Um, it might be a little bit of work up front, but you can go back, you can save scholarships within there.

You can sometimes save essays in there that you can use with several different search engines. Um, so you can use those for several different scholarships, just make sure that if you are writing an essay and using that for other scholarships. That you are changing important, um, detail about who the scholarship is, um, things like that, so that you make sure that you align your, your essay with a specific scholarship.

So let's go over some of the online search engines that are available. First of all, MIFA Pathway, which is available at some high schools, but anyone can sign up for this. With a free account at any time, and you can go to MIFA. org to find the MIFA Pathway link, and you can join there as a student, set up an account, and then you can set up criteria about yourself, your state of residence, area of study, ethnicity, type of school, um, and there's a database right now of about 5, 000 national scholarships within MIFA Pathways.

There's also some tools in there that will help you keep track of deadlines, the scholarship status, the amount of the scholarships that you're receiving, which is very helpful because a lot of scholarships have different deadlines. So you wanna make sure that you are meeting the deadlines of each particular scholarship that you wish to apply for.

So if you go to mifa pathway org, you can set up and register for an account if you already have. Have an account through your high school or if you already set one up in the past, you can log into your existing account and use that to help with the scholarship search as well. FastWeb is another national search engine that was, um, founded over 25 years ago.

They have 1. 5 billion college scholarships in their database. So this database can match you with a lot of scholarships. Um, the biggest complaint I hear from students about FastWeb is it matches them with Too many scholarships. So they sometimes get overwhelmed and don't know how to, um, narrow it down to the best scholarships.

So, what you should do if you do end up in that situation where there are too many scholarships that you're matching with, take a look at, um, what the scholarship is, how many scholarships they're going to be giving out each year, um, and try to see what your odds are of getting that scholarship and prioritize the ones that you meet the most criteria for that.

It seems like this you. This sounds like me that they're describing when they're talking about who they're looking for, um, to give this scholarship to. Each scholarship on FastWeb is vetted by a real person. So all of the scholarships on FastWeb should be legitimate. Um, so those 1. 5 million scholarships, they seem too good to be true, but they are all vetted and you, you must become a member of FastWeb to access the scholarships, but it's a free membership.

Um, and you can just follow those easy application instructions there to join that up. And once you set up that membership, you can go and log back in and see the scholarships that you match with and have a running list there to help you start with your applications. Bold. org is another scholarship search engine, but the difference between bold.

org is they have some scholarships that are exclusive to bold. org. They also work with donors to have donors set up scholarships for students. And you set up a profile there and they match you with scholarships based on that tier on that profile to bold. org donors. So they do have exclusive scholarships on there that you won't see on a place like past, um, fast web because they're exclusive to bolt.

org. Big future is another database owned by the college board. The college board is the entity that does the S. A. T. They do the CSS profile, so they do a lot with, with, um, colleges and universities. And again, you, um, set up a profile and get matched with a list of scholarships very similar to fast web.

This may have a lot of the same scholarships that are on fast web as well, but it's another great search engine for you to use. And they do have a great tool on here where you can use an autofill function. So if there's like information on several different scholarship applications, it will autofill that for you across the different scholarship applications and make that process a little bit easier for you.

Raise. me is a little bit different where you set up a free account on here and then There are certain colleges and universities that participate. There's usually, there's about two to three hundred now that they have available, um, that they have partnered with. And what happens is when a student, um, attains a certain point, getting an A, getting, taking an AP class, doing volunteering, once, once you qualify, doing one of those accomplishments.

You get what they call micro scholarships, and they differ from college to college that are partnering that you participate with. So you set up an account. And you make a list of scholarships of colleges. That you think you might be interested in, and then once you attain these. Certain, um,

you, once you get these certain A's or AP classes, um, or do these accomplishments. Then they give you these micro scholarships and each school tells you what that will be worth. So getting an A at, let's call it one, may be a 25 scholarship if you go to that school. And if you go to school two, they may say that getting an A, they'll guarantee you a 2, 000 scholarship.

And what these micro scholarships do, they all add up and at each college, based on all the different accomplishments that you've attained, um, they will tell you what the minimum scholarship you will get at that certain college will be if you are accepted to that college. But again, it's with only those partner colleges that they, they have there.

Um, but it's a great way to start early. Um, if you are earlier in your high school career, this is a great way to start and learn what your scholarship earnings might be from a certain college, just based on different accomplishments that you attain. So, while you're out on the Internet and looking at different applications, please be aware and avoid scams.

Um, any scholarship that asks for a fee, please be cautious of those are scams. Any legitimate scholarship is not going to ask you for a fee. Um, you or your student may receive an email saying that if you join our scholarship. Search, um, we will guarantee you a scholarship with, but you have to do an application fee of 250 dollars.

Um, that's always a scam. Please avoid those. Please also avoid if, um, a scholarship is asking for any really Thank you. personal information like social security number. You shouldn't get that out. Please avoid anything like that.

And some companies claim to offer scholarships, but are just using that information for marketing purposes to get student emails, to get student addresses. So just please be careful that you're going to one of the vetted sites where you are applying for a scholarship. Top tips to find scholarships. So please start searching early.

Um, private scholarships are sometimes open to children as young as five years old, so you don't have to wait until your senior year to start looking. Sometimes there are, um, scholarships that are available when a student's in grammar school that you can use, um, for college. There may be contests that students can apply for.

Um, sometimes there are poster contests, there are art contests, there are essay contests that younger students can enter that they will give them a prize that they can use. Um, for their future college education. So be aware if you have time and you are earlier in the process, start looking early. It might help you out.

Um, stay organized deadlines for all private scholarships. They're all over the place. So, um, again, this helps in doing the search early because some scholarships have. Deadlines that are a year before you're enrolling for college other scholarships have later deadlines. So you may think you've missed all the deadlines for scholarships, but some have much later deadlines.

So you may still have those available, but check the deadlines of every scholarship again. There is a great. tool within MIFA Pathways to use to keep track of all of that. You can also just create a spreadsheet on your own, um, using Excel or however would be useful to you on paper, any way that you can, but just keep, keep, um, a spreadsheet of those in all the different deadlines, especially for the scholarships that are local that you think you have a really great chance at.

Don't miss those deadlines, um, because those Are really the ones you have the best shot. Set a weekly goal. Um, you're more likely to earn a scholarship if you submit an application for many. So try to set a goal for the number of scholarships. Um, I've always said in my years of financial aid. To students, they say, oh, it takes so much time to apply for these scholarships.

All these essays are taking me a lot of time. But there's very few part time jobs that if you put in an hour worth of work, which is what most essays that you're writing or most scholarship applications you can do in under an hour or a couple of hours, there's very few jobs that you can make 5, 000, 1, 000, even a couple of hundred dollars.

Um, in an hour, so it really can pay off to put in a few hours work a week towards getting a couple of thousand dollar scholarships, the amount of time that you're putting in, there's very few part time jobs that can get the same pay out for you. And, um, interestingly enough, most students avoid scholarships that require an essay.

So if you see that a scholarship requires an essay, it may take you a little bit more time, but, um, most students are avoiding those. So the pool for those scholarships is a lot smaller. So sometimes ones that require an essay are actually a great, um, return on investment for writing those essays. Because there are less applicants that you're competing against for those scholarships.

And oftentimes the scholarship essay that's required is something a student may have already read. It may be something that they can rework their college admissions essay towards one of these scholarship essays. Or once you write the scholarship essay once, you can just tweak it a Just make sure that When you are doing that, that you change any pertinent information about that.

Oh, I'm applying for a scholarship Z, make sure that you're changing that to the right name. Make sure that if you're using a college admissions application essay that you're not saying, I am writing this essay to apply to certain school, make sure that you take out all of that information and make it pertinent to the scholarship that you're applying to.

Again, look for scholarships that are related to your favorite activities. You'd be surprised that the number of scholarships that are out there for unusual, um, extracurricular activities, interests, talents. Maybe something that you did in school or something you do outside of school, something that's totally not tied to academics at all.

Put those interests in when you're searching for scholarships. And again, if you have something that, um, makes you very unique, please put that in, in the scholarship search engine. Because that may match you up with a scholarship that not a lot of other students are going to be applying for, and that will give you a foot up on things.

Also, when you're going through the scholarship process, when you go into the college admissions process in general, um, it might be a good idea to clean up your online profile. Sometimes The people who are vetting scholarships, maybe down to a few applicants, so they want to make a decision between and they might go online to social media to see.

What that person looks like, that's applying for their scholarship. So make sure that anything that you have out there in on public social media pages. Represents your best self, just put things out there that you're proud of that you're, you wouldn't be embarrassed about so that. Wind is scholarship.

Searches are looking back at the applicant. They're not going to see anything that will discourage them from giving that scholarship to you again, never pay for a fee for a scholarship search tool. There are so many free online search tools that exist. Um, there aren't any scholarships that are available.

for a fee that aren't available for free if you look through that. So they use the same search engines. They're just scamming you and trying to get you to pay for that for free. So just skip anything that's asking for a fee and go to those free search engines. So how do scholarships work in conjunction with financial aid?

So Most of the financial aid for a student comes from the school and university. So the schools and universities also do award scholarships to students. They also award grants and need based aid, um, but they sometimes do award merit based scholarships as well. So make sure that you're applying for financial aid at the college and university that The student is planning to attend.

Even if you think that you may not qualify for need based financial aid, it is usually a good idea to apply through the FAFSA and through the College for Financial Aid. Sometimes you might be eligible for. Merit scholarships and some colleges do require that you apply for financial aid for merit scholarships as well.

Others don't, but um, since the free application for federal student aid, that also is a free application. Make sure that you file that, um, to see if you do qualify for financial aid at the college. And again, make sure you meet those deadlines at each of the colleges and universities that you're applying for.

And once you do receive a private scholarship. Let the financial aid office know at each college where you're applying. They will then look at if there is any unmet need for a student. So what unmet need is, is the difference between the cost of education. The family contribution in any financial aid that you've already received from the school.

If there is any gap between when you subtract all those numbers, that's called unmet need. Most colleges will then just take that private scholarship and apply it 1st to that date. If all of the need has been that for. A student, most of the time, the financial aid office will then reduce the loan amount that the student is going to be eligible for or reduce the subsidized amount of the loan if the entire amount of the funding for aid.

Is less than the cost of education, but contact each school. They all have different policies on how they will deal with outside scholarships, but most will do everything they can to maximize the amount that you're receiving in scholarship and grant aid and try to keep your, your loans as small as they can as well, but contact the financial aid at each college to see how they will deal with the scholarship.

And you do have to announce to each school that you have received a private scholarship. That is a federal regulation. So you will have to, um, let each college know that you received a private scholarship and disclose that. Okay, we went through a lot of information there. Um, are there any questions.

Stephanie Wells: So we, I have one.

Well, I first want to make a quick comment, Sean, for the, for the whole group. We do have. Lots of webinars on the MIFA website, including Financial Aid 101, that gets into a lot more detail about need based aid and need based scholarships, so definitely check that out. What Sean's talking about today is mostly, you know, the private scholarships that you would get outside of scholarships, maybe directly from the college.

But with that said, We did have one quick question about a need based about need based FAFSA form and whether non permanent residents like child of expat from a foreign country would be able to apply for the FAFSA and how that differs from these

Shawn Morrissey: private scholarships. Yes, so the FAFSA, you do have to be what is considered an eligible non citizen.

So you have to, to meet that criteria in order to file the FAFSA, but the, the student needs to be. An eligible non citizen or a citizen in order to qualify for that. So even if the parents are not, you can still apply for that if the student meets that criteria.

Stephanie Wells: That's excellent. And Jennifer typed out an answer that I thought was a good, good answer to a good question.

Um, so I thought we could just cover that with the group. And the question was, is it safe to provide all personal information of my student to all the scholarship foundations out there? How do I tell if it's not a legitimate scholarship and I love your thoughts, Sean, but Jennifer did mention to steer clear of any that are asking for security numbers, they typically don't ask for so security numbers, but if you have any other tips.

Shawn Morrissey: Yes, definitely don't give out any social security numbers about that any, any information that you wouldn't want to

give out that's personally identifiable, you shouldn't be giving out on the internet for any scholarship. Most scholarships are just going to ask for student name, where they're going to college, and information about where they went to high school, that type of thing. But they won't be asking for a social security number, um, anything like that.

Those are things to avoid, for sure. Great.

Stephanie Wells: And we've pretty much Answered all of them. Let me just see.

Yeah, more questions about the FAFSA, which we're really not covering knee base aid tonight, folks, but we can answer that offline. Yes. So if you have any questions, go ahead and type those in now. We'll see. We've answered most of them, Sean.

Shawn Morrissey: Okay. Thank you. Let me just go to the next slide here.

And please, if you want to. Okay. Connect with me on social media. These are the different ways that you can do that. We have Facebook linked in. Um, Instagram, we have a YouTube channel. We're on Twitter, and we have the podcast on the dot org where there's a lot of great information as well. Um, and if you go to be for that, or again, there are.

Recordings to a lot of different webinars, there's. Financially, 1 on 1, where we go through all types of financially need based. And non need based aid, we go through how to fill out the FAFSA, um, and cover a lot of those questions that we didn't cover tonight on just the scholarship webinar. I

Stephanie Wells: think that's it, Sean, for questions. I don't see any new ones coming in.

Shawn Morrissey: Okay, thank you. And we will be sending out a recording, um, a link to the recording of this to everyone who registered.

Great. I think we're good. Okay. Thank you very much.

Stephanie Wells: Have a good night, everybody. Thank you.

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