Olivia Krueger (’19) looks through various scholarship and college opportunities outside the career center in the library. Photo by Yasir Khaleq.
by Benjamin Minch, Staff Writer
Paying for college can be a daunting task when the average University of California tuition is $12,000 and the average California State University tuition is $6,000. Many students use loans or fall into debt paying for college, not knowing how many scholarships are actually available to them.
There are endless amounts of scholarships available to California students, but most require intensive internet searching and data mining to find. Oftentimes, students will give up after this because finding money is extremely difficult.
However, here is a full summary of scholarship tools and ways to find scholarships that meet your requirements in order to make the task of finding money a little less daunting.
One of the best scholarship tools that I and many others have used is Scholly. Unfortunately, this isn’t a free service, but it is well worth the $3 price tag. Scholly uses your GPA, interests, volunteer work, and SAT scores to find scholarships that are molded to those categories and that you are qualified for.
Most of the scholarships on Scholly only take minutes to fill out and submit because they are only small paragraph-long prompts. Some even have no prompt and are as easy as clicking a button.
“ I have gotten many weird scholarships with this tool, including a $500 dollar one for writing a paragraph about water conservation,” says Edmund Vu (‘18), a user of Scholly. “It is a super easy way to get free money for school and will help you sort out all the options.”
I, personally, have actually won a $250 scholarship with this tool already because I was the only entrant. Scholly shows you so many weird scholarships that would be impossible to find anywhere else, such as the “Superpower Scholarship” or the “Project Yellow Light Scholarship,” which gives you $2,000 for creating a road sign.
If you are looking for a free option, you can try the College Board website, which also has a filtering system that can help you find scholarships based on ethnicity, merit and disabilities. There are scholarships for having a hitchikers thumb, being left handed and more.
On the other hand, the College Board website frequently shows scholarships that are widely known about, so it is harder to win, but it is free and easy to use.
“I have only won one scholarship from the College Board website, and the website interface isn’t very user-friendly. It even showed me expired scholarships that after typing an essay, didn’t let me submit it,” said Timmy Ho (’17).
Many others have had complications with this website, making it an unreliable source of scholarships. There are still many interesting ones such as The Clowns of America Scholarship, which gives money to clowns to get educated, a Halloween Pumpkin Scholarship and a vegetarian scholarship.
Searching for scholarships is a daunting task that seems impossible to complete because of the endless loop of the web, but with these tools, it becomes a more manageable one with endless possibilities.
