The Insider: College Admissions Advice from the Experts

Deadlines and Organization Matter When Searching for Scholarships!

Earlier in our scholarship series, we wrote about finding and identifying different types of scholarships. This week, we’ll share tips and tricks for staying organized, a critical part of the process of maximizing your scholarships.

How Will Private Scholarships Affect Financial Aid?

So you’ve secured an outside scholarship? Now what? Do you need to report it to the college?

As a new mom to twin daughters, paying for multiple students in college at one time is something I think about all the time. I’m sure I’m not alone.  As we discussed last week, merit aid (or scholarships) are available to students for a variety of reason – many of them unrelated to academic, athletic, or artistic prowess! Just as there are scholarships for tall and short individuals, there are a handful of colleges that currently offer special discounts or scholarships to siblings and multiples.

When I began refusing to eat meat in high school, I drove my mother crazy.  All of a sudden, she had to cook two separate family dinners each night:  one for the carnivores in the house and one for me. (Shame on me – while I had embraced eating vegetarian food, I had not yet mastered cooking it myself. I guess I owe her one.)

Tip #3: Online database searches can yield results!

In the last two posts of our Scholarship Series, we’ve covered different types of scholarships; this week we’ll dig into one of the main resources for discovering those scholarships.

Tip #2: Colleges are an important source of scholarships!

In this second part of our scholarship series, we will cover colleges themselves as a source for three very different types of scholarships – merit aid, donor-restricted scholarships, and department-supported scholarships. You may also want to refer to part one of our series, where we talk about the wide availability of scholarship money.

5 Things Everyone Should Know About Scholarships

Whenever there is mention of college, the conversation about scholarships isn’t far behind. But what are scholarships? How can you get them? How much are they worth? Who awards them? With the cost of higher education continually rising, students should take a proactive approach in locating scholarship opportunities to help cover their college expenses. We believe students should set reasonable goals and be aware of a few important things as they search for scholarships. Over the next few weeks, we’ll introduce five things we think everyone should know about scholarships, starting with Part One below.

This is the fifth in a series of posts that college finance expert, Laurie Peltier, is writing about her own experience going through the college application and enrollment processes with her kids. Her previous posts focused on how to stay organized during the college search and final decision-making processes, getting to know your school and the Federal Work Study program. Here, she discusses the application process and benefits of the Army ROTC program.

In addition to educational opportunities in the field of game creation and design, there are now scholarships for those who play. Play you say? Yes, you play, it pays! Now, I share a 20^th century parent’s natural concern for my 21^st century children who are engulfed by screens throughout their day. But all those hours spent indoors could be a potential scholarship goldmine. For all the young gamers (and their parents) out there, there are whole crops of college scholarship opportunities, degree programs, and entire gaming institutions that seem to have popped up overnight.

Families that have the most success paying for college are the ones who approach the process as a family. Most people agree it is important to start talking to your children early about the importance of attending college, but what about talking about how to pay for it?