Tips to Get Money for College 8: How to Avoid Frustration or Wasting Time

Saturdays we share tips or cautions to facilitate getting scholarships or avoid problems

Sherry was a junior in college when she first started working with us to get scholarships. She went through a couple of scholarship search engines, but found the process frustrating. She tried to balance her schooling, work, and finding scholarships. It all seemed overwhelming.  She had worked so hard on her master application. However, she couldn’t find actual applications to complete. It seemed that most of the scholarships on her lists were contests, surveys, or other scams. She gave up looking for scholarships several times.

Frustrations You Will Encounter in Applying for Scholarships

Applying for scholarships creates frustration, anxiety, self-doubt, and feelings of rejection. All of these feelings may come to you before you hear back from a single scholarship committee. In fact, you may feel them before you even send of one application.

Several factors in finding and applying for scholarships or other financial aid create these feelings:

• Scholarship search engines try to fool you into soliciting information you don’t want
• Results of your scholarship profiles generate confusing lists of contests, essays, scholarships, contests, and more chaos
• Investigating, researching, verifying, and preparing all the information on your reusable application, reusable essays, and letters of recommendation requires a lot of time
• You will only marginally qualify for many of the scholarships listed on your results, yet you still have to look at them to review all the qualifications
• You find yourself half way through an application when you find a piece of information that disqualifies you from applying
• You feel you are wasting your time
• You submit twenty applications and receive only one for $500

How to Reconcile Yourself to the Frustrations

You may maintain your motivation with several thoughts.

• If you apply for 20 scholarships and take 1 hour each, get 19 rejections, and only 1 ward for $1,000; you will have earned $50 an hour for your time
• How many hours—and at what frustrating labor—would you have to work to earn $1,000

Tuesday we will review how Zinch can help you double your scholarship money