I have to admit that I was a pretty lazy scholarship searcher throughout my time in college.  And I still wound up graduating with 75% of college covered. I’m not gonna lie, part of it is that I had the skills and grades to turn into scholarships, but mostly it was just a little half-assed application of effort. And this is my story of how half-assing something got me $500 a semester for all of undergrad:

            Flashback to the winter of 2000. I was actually a Junior and in one of my AP classes, one of the Seniors was talking about an oratorical contest they were applying to do in about two weeks with the local American Legion chapter. I can’t remember if Google was a verb yet, but I recall Asking Jeeves later on that evening about this scholarship and it turned out any high school student could apply for it – not just Seniors. I literally have no idea why I thought this would be a good idea, as public speaking was not remotely my thing, but before thinking it through, I printed out and sent in my entry to the competition. And then I forgot about it.

I abruptly recalled that I had entered it 24 hours before the competition, when the same Senior who had initially mentioned it, spent our lab period that morning practicing his speech while he cut up his pig. I’m pretty sure my exact thoughts where a couple of colorful swear words and then I proceeded to cut the new few classes to go to “band lessons” (sorry any teachers reading this, if you suspected that band lessons were often a lie – they usually were. Not always, but usually), which was actually hiding in the library desperately trying to write a 7-10 minute speech about My Favorite Amendment. Do you have any idea how long 7 minutes is? Good golly.

Come the next morning, I get to the school auditorium and start milling around, wondering how the heck I’m ever going to stretch my aimless ramblings about the free exercise of religion. I go up to check in and realize there don’t seem to be that many people there. Then I get issued my number – 3 – and get directed to go sit in an area with the other orators.

So I go sit with these other 2 guys and no one else appears. Which seems pretty awesome to me, since in the back of my mind I recalled there were scholarships for 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place.  Then the dreaded 4^th joins us. We all go up and do our speeches – fortunately for me, number 2 was not that smart and actually talked about stuff that had nothing to do with anyone’s favorite Amendment – or an Amendment at all. This took off a lot of the pressure as it now looked like I was actually going to pull this off and get some kind of scholarship from this mess. I went up, made it to 7 minutes talking about who knows what not, and walked away with 2^nd place and $500 a semester from the local American Legion.

The point of the story is that sometimes it’s worth it to apply even if you’re unsure, because the competition may not be up for it. I also noticed that if you have to do anything other than send in an essay, that alone cuts the competition in half – I mean, in a school of close to 1,000, 4 people showed up for an oratorical contest.

However, so I don’t end this story on the note that you should be a total slacker, the 1^st place winner got to go onto the county competition to compete for a much higher scholarship, and that winner kept moving up and so on and so forth. Our 1^st place winner had a conflict the day of the county competition, so I go to tapped to go. Suffice to say that utter lack of preparation does not cut it at the county level and I looked like number 2 that day. So, you know, always do your best. I did not get any scholarships from there.

If you’re looking for scholarships, here are a few tips I remember from my scholarship searching days, which were both kind of long ago and not so long ago, because there are scholarships and research grants for grad school too, my friends.

*High school kids should buddy up to their guidance counselors. We actually had a secretary who was solely responsible for college related matters. I got to know her after this American Legion debacle. Seriously, I should’ve introduced myself as a freshman and told her I’d love to know if she ever hears about scholarships that are open to any high school student. That same secretary would compile a list of scholarships, both gigantic, national ones like the Coca-Cola scholarship and itty, bitty ones like the local American Legion oratorical contest once a month and print out packets that you could swing by her office and pick up. They had all the info on how to enter. The main benefit of these packets was the local scholarships – a surprising number of local companies would contact her, so she was definitely the best resource for finding them. If you’re unsure if such a person exists at your school, ask your guidance counselor, they should get paid to know this stuff.

*Make a list of every skill you have, right down to the weird ones like you can touch your nose with your tongue or speak Klingon. Then add your ethnicity or nationality and anything else that sets you apart (seriously, I was born with one hand, you want to know the only time in my life I’ve ever tried to leverage that? College scholarships. Oh, and climbing that rope in gym class growing up. I wasn’t having any of that). Once you have that list, Google ‘“Klingon fluency” scholarship’ ‘”I can touch my nose with my tongue” scholarship’ because honestly, you never know what’s gonna pop up. And when you have really specific requirements to scholarships that you actually fit, that narrows your competition considerably. Like every college kid in America is going to throw their hat into the ring for the Coca-Cola scholarship. Four kids are going to give a speech about their favorite Amendment (well, 3 Amendment speeches and 1 crazy rambling).

*Contact the HR departments of large companies in your city or where your parents work and ask if they have an scholarships for high school students. I grew up near Merck and they had a pretty good sized scholarship available to kids who were going into science fields (which as we’ve ascertained, was not me).

*Spend some time searching the web in general. There are some very large scholarship websites out there. It’s easy to get bogged down in them, but the same rules apply as I’ve written above – if they have very narrow requirements or ask you to do something weird (a friend of mine built a diorama – do people even still do that?? – for a scholarship from a nearby museum and she was the only one who even turned something in, kaching for her) go for it! I would also usually go for it if the scholarship amount was huge too and the requirements weren’t too crazy – I mean, someone’s got to win it, right (that someone was never me)?

*After you peruse the larger sites and look through a few scholarships, you’ll probably notice that a lot of them ask for the same sort of essays. If you build up a small pile of 3-4 generic essays that answer those questions that can be just slightly tailored for each scholarship, you can apply for a lot of the big ones with minimal effort. I’m not advocating skimping on all your applications, but I sort of considered these filler. There are a LOT of scholarships from big companies or organizations that want to know about an event that made you the person you are today or about how you’re going to change the world. They all want to know exactly the same dang thing. So you might was well tell them exactly the same dang thing. I really feel like your just essentially entering a lottery with these scholarships. There’s no way they read all the entries. If it were me, I’d just randomly pull them out of a pile and read until I found one that impressed me. Huzzah. Winner. Probably good that I don’t decide who gets scholarships…

*My last bit of advice is to always check out scholarship packages at the schools you apply to. I actually wound up picking a school that gave you a nearly automatic scholarship if you were in a certain percentage of your class and had a certain SAT score. There was just a chart they looked at and that was how much money you got. It endlessly annoyed my good friend that I went to college with from high school that I got more money than she did, because my SAT score destroyed hers, even though we both finished in the top 10% of our class – I was way at the bottom of that 10% and she was our valedictorian.

*I lied – one more bit – once you’re in college, there is often another office, just like in high school, where you can find someone who keeps track of the scholarships and often knows where you can apply for more. For instance, an incoming freshman might not have a major decided, but once you do, you may be able to apply for scholarships from that department. Personally, I wound up with an extra scholarship from my department and then one from an outside theater by the time I finished college.

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