College is expensive, and you’ve probably heard that there are millions (yes, millions) of dollars out there in unclaimed scholarships every year. So, how do you find them?

Start With These Four Sites

Scholly
Niche
Appily
Scholarships360

These four don’t force you to create a login in order to continue. They will contain some overlap in the scholarships listed, of course.

I recommend starting with scholarships that don’t require an essay or really much depth of information. Apply for those first because they’re easier, and you can get warmed up for this process. There are plenty of scholarships that only require your basic information to throw your hat in the ring. Apply for all of them!

Many of these scholarships are college specific, major specific, or focused on one topic (like a creative writing contest or an essay on patriotism). So, once you get through the scholarships with no essays, start looking for topics that interest you. These sites will have options to focus your search by college, major, gender, and more. But, I have found that it’s best to apply only one criteria at a time. If you try to find a scholarship that’s specifically for women going into history at a NY college for more than $10000…you might find a hit. But, it’s far more likely that you’ll find scholarships for women that can work at many colleges, or scholarships for history majors that are available to both men and women. So, one criteria restriction at a time makes more sense.

Next, Create Accounts on These Sites

Once you start applying to scholarships, you’ll create accounts on every one of these sites. But, the following sites require you to create an account in order to continue.

Scholarships.com
Going Merry
ScholarshipOwl
FastWeb
Unigo
BigFuture

Search through these sites with the same criteria. Again, you’ll find repeats, but you’ll also find new scholarships not featured on other sites!

A note on BigFuture: At the link above, you want to go to their “Featured Scholarships” (just scroll a little bit down) and check out their personalized matches and Student Search Service. For those, you’ll create a login.

After that, you can check out their big directory.

BigFuture’s Big Directory

You can find their big directory here. There are thousands of scholarships listed here, and there isn’t a search function (that’s offered in their Student Search Service and elsewhere on site). Here, you’ll just find a massive list. But, you can still do Ctrl+F (or Command+F) to search for any key words you like. I think this is a better place to dive in after you’ve done a lot of scholarship searching already because this part will be a bit more tedious. But, it’s a nice way to find any remaining stragglers you may have missed in all the other searches.

And Then What?

When you’ve found scholarships you want to apply for, start writing! Don’t wait until the deadline. Some scholarships may only have a few applicants, but many scholarships will be competitive. Submit these applications early, just like colleges. Start writing your essays early, just like colleges. Start writing with enough time to get through at least 6 drafts of each essay.

The writing style and guidelines will largely follow college application essay guidelines, so if you’ve already conquered your college essays (and especially if you’ve already gotten accepted to great schools) then you can follow your same template.

If you got rejected from a couple of schools in the early round, you might want to reevaluate your essays for both style and content, and that would translate to the scholarship essays as well. If you’d like help with that, feel free to reach out! Email: desryn@gmail.com Text: (‪301) 960 7490