Source of Money 25: Nationally Coveted College…Awards

Tuesdays we review a source of financial aid to help you pay for college

Bernadette was entering a doctoral program. They gave her a nice assistantship which paid thousands of dollars. She still needed more money, however. She did not find too many scholarships for doctoral students. She did find some fellowships that provided additional funding to pay for school. She also found some research grants through her sponsors that she received an additional stipend for assisting them. She found $30,000 more to pay for incidentals of her program.

Description of NCSGFPA

Francisco A Tomei Torres maintains the web site Nationally Coveted Scholarships, Graduate Fellowships & Postdoctoral Awards (http://scholarships.fatomei.com) This fairly straight forward states that it offers

“Highly competitive and prestigious undergraduate college scholarships, graduate fellowships, education grants, summer jobs & research internships, awards for high school seniors & students, women, minorities, Hispanics, African Americans, nurses, engineers, teachers studying math, science & engineering and health professions from national & international foundations. Free financial aid, student loans, prizes, stipends.”

Features of The Web Site

The landing page consists of four main parts:

• An RSS feed that rotates through deadlines for various scholarships
• Four columns of links to search scholarships for certain groups
  • A yellow box that lists “Deadlines” and “Updates”
    • Deadlines for application
    • Updates of changes
• Ad Choices links (These have not been screened and generate revenue for the site)
• The actual list of scholarships with titles and brief explanations.
  • Each scholarship shows an icon indicating who may apply for the award
    • Brown diamonds indicate good for K-12 (yes, scholarships to attend basic education)
    • Green hearts indicate college scholarships
    • Yellow clubs indicate graduate fellowships
    • Red clovers indicate postgraduate awards
  • Clicking on the title of the scholarship or award links you directly to the sponsoring page for the scholarship and award

Disadvantages of the Nationally Coveted…Awards

• It requires a lot of reading to sift through all the information on the web site
• Contains ads that do not look like ads
• Created in 1998 and updated it in 2009, contains some old information

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