Searching for Money

Receiving a scholarship can lighten your financial burden considerably during the college years, but if you don’t receive on from your university there are still many more options. Scholarship search sites can help you navigate the numerous awards available, but they are not all created equal. Make sure you create a special Yahoo! e-mail account for your scholarship search; some of these sites make their money selling your e-mail address and others are blocked by more sophisticated sites.www.collegeplan.orgThis site is hard to navigate and is not very useful, it is more suited for high school students looking for information than college students looking for money.www.hecb.wa.gov/paying/waaidprgm/waaidprgmindex.asp The Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board website is clean and easy to use. It contains information on grants and scholarships that pertain to Washington state residents. You can find out if you are eligible for state programs on this site, but most are grants or scholarships for high school seniors. Still worth a quick browse.https://apps.collegeboard.com/cbsearch_ss/welcome.jsp You probably haven’t used this site since you took the SAT, but it does have a wide scholarship database search and is not too difficult to use. It includes internship opportunities and each scholarship description has contact information for the organization giving out the award. If you are looking to cast a wide net, this search will work well.www.collegedata.com/cs/index.jhtmlThis is a very busy website with so much going on it is hard to know where to look first. When imputing data into the scholarship finder be aware that it is organized strangely and you might need to look under “Humanities” or some other broad field to find your major. The search feature works well and as a nice addition includes subsets of the field. When I searched for journalism the results included awards for related fields like copy editing. Recommended.