3 Tips for Finding Scholarships for High School and College Students

Unlock the secrets to finding money for college for first-generation and all students in this solo episode with me, Jen Schoen. 

Have you ever wondered how to unearth scholarships that could be the key to affording college? Join me as I guide families and students through the world of scholarship searches, utilizing powerful engines like College Greenlight, Scholarship Owl, and FastWeb. Discover how leveraging networks, including local banks, teachers, and community organizations, can open doors to unexpected opportunities. Plus, hear an ingenious tip from Sam Lim, founder of Scholarship Junkies!

But that’s not all—I’m sharing ways to enhance your scholarship search strategy. Whether your students are still in high school or navigating through their college journey, these tips are crafted to empower them with the resources they need. 

I invite families and students to share their experiences and ideas with me at firstgenfm.com or via email at jen@firstgenfm.com. I'd love to answer your questions! 

For more about me - my experience and my speaking, check out the links below.

You can reach me at jen@firstgenfm.com.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenschoen/
https://www.firstgenfm.com/speaker-high-school-educators-students-parents

Chapters

• 0:04 Scholarship Tips for Educators and Students
• 10:49 College Funding Support and Sharing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome and welcome back to the FirstGenFM podcast, where we high school and college educators strengthen, celebrate and support first-generation college and college-bound students. I'm Jennifer Schoen, your host. Please call me Jen. I'd love it if you could leave a review and a rating for this podcast to help other educators find us. Thank you so much for taking the time to do that. Now let's dive into this week's episode.

Speaker 1: 0:32

Today is a solo episode where I want to spend a little bit of time talking about scholarships and I hope that these three scholarship tips and maybe two things to avoid will help you help your students, whether they're in high school or they're in college. So one of my first tips is to definitely use the big search engines to start, I think places like College Greenlight and Scholarship Owl are really helpful for students to see the types and the broad array of scholarships that are available to them. I like ScholarshipOwl and FastWeb because you can put in all the information and then the search engine works and it will tell the students, it will email them different options for them to apply to. I also really like College Greenlight. As someone who works in the first-gen space at college, I think that College Greenlight provides a variety of opportunities for students to look for scholarships. If you just go to their scholarship page and I will go ahead and put a link to that in the show notes for all of these things that I'm talking about For College Greenlight you can search. High school juniors can search as well as seniors. I know that sometimes we think, oh, you have to be a senior to search, but they have an opportunity for juniors to search. They have opportunities for college freshmen and sophomores. So it's not that if you don't get a scholarship before you get in college, you can never get one. No, there are many opportunities to do that. So college freshmen and sophomores can search on College Greenlight as well. And then they also have opportunities for students looking for master's degrees, and you don't hear about that a lot. So I want to make sure I mention that, especially for those of us who work with students who are currently in college and are looking to continue their education past their baccalaureate degree. So I just thought that was really fantastic.

Speaker 1: 2:28

College Greenlight also allows you to search based on demographics. So if you're a woman, if you're African American and or Hispanic or LGBTQIA+, you can look at specific scholarships for you if you fit that demographic. And, of course, my favorite, there's also scholarships just for first generation college students. Another reason to like College Greenlight I've been working with College Greenlight through my institution for a while and using their database to get the word out about the scholarship that we have at Northeastern called the TORCH Scholarship. That is for first-generation students who are Pell eligible and that means they have to be eligible for federal financial aid and typically that's US citizen, permanent resident, sometimes also refugee or asylee status. So if that's something that you're listening, you're like ooh, Northeastern Scholarship for First-Gen Students. Check it out at torchnortheasternedu. So that's my little commercial.

Speaker 1: 3:36

But back to College Greenlight. The ability to search based on what year you are in school, in college or heading to your master's degree, as well as demographic, I think, opens up a really wide variety for students to see that there are options out there, and if they take the time and start looking, they are going to find things that work for them, and so we just need to get these resources out to them so that they're aware of them and they can start looking. My second tip students need to be able to ask for help, and by asking and telling other people that they are looking for scholarships. That is networking. It's the very beginning of networking and allows our students to really find the people that may connect them to the resources that you can't find online or to the opportunities to get scholarships that they can find online. I tell students, if you happen to be going to an ATM which now maybe with Venmo, these things are out of date but if they happen to be going to an ATM and there's a bank attached because that's not always the case either right, If there's a bank attached, to go on in and ask if they have scholarships for students going to college or for students in college, depending on where they're at. They can also, of course, tell all their teachers that they're looking for scholarships because they might know somebody, Tell any organizations they're part of and ask their advisors, their community organizations, if they offer scholarships Because there is money out there, if they're willing to put themselves out there and share that. They either need funding or would like to have funding to go to college, need funding or would like to have funding to go to college.

Speaker 1: 5:14

I heard this great tip from Sam who founded Scholarship Junkies, and what he said helped him get scholarships was he obviously sat down in his guidance office at his high school and went through all of the information they had and applied to scholarships through them and looked on his high school's website to find out what else he could find, and applied to many, many scholarships. But the thing that I thought was brilliant was that he also went online at all the rival high schools that were around him and he looked at the scholarships that they had listed, because sometimes the ones that are at your high school especially maybe if it's an under-resourced high school may not be as robust as if it's a more affluent high school. And so he says his tip was to go to these other high schools that are around you, to your rival high schools, and steal all their scholarships. So, which is kind of what he did, he actually got a few scholarships that he found on other high school's websites. So I just thought that was a brilliant tip and I wanted to pass that along. Now I think my third tip is is that certainly artificial intelligence, AI, chat GPT, depending on what you use can be helpful in finding scholarships too, and I would say to students to give that a try, or to you to give that a try if you want to, but chat GPT isn't always correct and so some vetting has to take place and they're going to have to go to the website anyway to find the real information on the scholarships. So those two big scholarship search engines I mentioned, along with FastWeb and asking for help, are my top two tips before we send students off to use AI to find what they need. So here's my three and a half tips, because it's a little bonus.

Speaker 1: 7:10

This last tip is specifically for students who are in college, although I think high school students can ask a question about this too. But let me backtrack a little bit. If you're working with students in college and you either have a relationship with financial aid or you'd like your students to reach out to financial aid, they can ask financial aid if there are any opportunities to get endowed scholarships, Depending on the size of the college, how long it's been around. Sometimes there are very specific scholarships for students who fit certain criteria and they may not know about that unless there is an endowed scholarship application. That might be on their financial aid website at the college or if they go to financial aid and they specifically ask for that. For high school students who are maybe talking to admissions counselors and asking about scholarships. Again, more of that asking for help.

Speaker 1: 8:03

That second tip I said talk to the admissions counselors and ask them A what scholarships they may have for incoming students, whether they're first-year students or transfer students, but also ask, once I get here, are there any endowed scholarships, Are there any other scholarships I can earn based on my major or based on my interests or based on my career track? And they may be surprised to find out, yes, there's some scholarships you cannot even get when you first enter, especially as a first year, but as you go into your major and through your major, you'll find other opportunities to earn scholarships. So those are the three tips I wanted to share To use the big search engines, especially College Greenlight, if you're a first-generation student, To ask for help, to reach out to others and tell them that you are looking for scholarships. And, finally, to talk about endowed scholarship and, whether you're a high school student, talking to the admissions counselor and asking about opportunities once they get to that particular college. Or asking their financial aid office or you as their advisor, what you know about scholarships at the college for students who are second, third and fourth years, or maybe even fifth years, to ask about those as well and again, what we want to do is open up opportunities for our students to find scholarships and give them a chance to help fund their education so they're not leaving with a lot of debt.

Speaker 1: 9:31

Now I did promise two things to avoid, and they're going to be really quick and simple. The first one is I always warn students about paying for college searches. There are so many free opportunities out there. I mentioned FastWeb, ScholarshipOwl, College Greenlight, Scholarship Junkies lots of opportunities out there that are free. So if they pay, it should not be for a scholarship search. Maybe it's for helping them write the perfect essay, but still, there's a lot of help out there if they want to find it for free, and we know a lot of our students do.

Speaker 1: 10:07

My second scholarships to avoid are the sweepstakes scholarships, and I think that's important because a lot of our students do. My second scholarships to avoid are the sweepstakes scholarships, and I think that's important because a lot of them are scams. There's really no money involved at the end or it's such a minimal amount that it doesn't really make sense for students to put their time and effort into filling out those sweepstakes cards, and a lot of times they will be email collection systems and then from there they will sell the emails and it will be a spam-a-palooza for our students. So I'd like to ask them to keep clear of that. So paying for college searches and sweepstakes, I think, are not the best use of their time or their money.

Speaker 1: 10:49

I hope you found these tips and things to avoid helpful and that you will share them with your students and help them find opportunities to get more money to help pay for college again, whether they're in high school or in college. As always, you can find me at firstgenfmcom or you can always email me at jen, that's j-e-n at firstgenfmcom. I would love to hear from you, especially if you have things that you want to share programs that you're doing in your high school for first-generation college-bound students, or that you're doing in college that is serving your first-gen college students. I hope you have a great week and I'll talk to you again next week. Thank you.