Colleges & Scholarships
This has been a long time coming, but I wanted to post some of my comments and tips from applying to various scholarships and colleges in my junior and senior years of high school. As fruits of my efforts, I was able to get over $8,000 in unrestricted personal scholarships and partially pay for my schooling at Carnegie Mellon University.
I did a presentation at the end of high school that encompassed a lot of the topics that I learned about in my research, including how to find and pursue your passion, develop an action plan to build upon your interests and not forget any deadlines, get the most out of a college or scholarship application, understand the ins and outs of financial aid, and finally how to keep everything organized! View the e-book here at 5 Key Steps To College and Scholarship Applications. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments or feel free to email me at nolan [at] nolanhergert.com.
Good Uncommon Scholarships to Research:
Elks Clubs (often have local branches that do mini competitions and qualify you for regional and state competitions!)
SEMI Pacific Northwest Scholarship (technology)
Oregon Student Assistance Commission (or another state-sponsored scholarship organization)
AHBAI Beauty Luster Scholarship
Comcast Leaders and Achievers Scholarship
Google Search “‘College Name’ + ‘Major’ + Scholarship” and see what you find. Some departmental scholarship programs are not as publicized by the school as others. Sometimes there are separate applications too
ScholarGator–a pet project of mine that scrapes local high school scholarship databases and aggregates them onto one website using Scrubyt and PHP/MySQL. Want to help or add new information? Email me!
Key Blogs That I Recommend:
Chris Penn (The Financial Aid Podcast): Excellent resource for up-to-date scholarship and financial aid information. I also highly recommend his e-books as well.
Cal Newport (Study Hacks Blog): Great tips for managing your first few years in college. Posts new articles a few times a week.
Zinch.com: Interesting social integration of students searching for colleges and colleges searching for students. Allows hosting of images, movies, etc., features ad-free scholarship searches, and allows you to “shout out” to a school.
